Almost three weeks have passed already since our ruin.1
I very much regret I did not write anything down. I should have taken note of almost every minute. But it was beyond my powers to do so. But we had absolutely no idea of what was going to happen on March 21 / April 3!
On noon of that day our maid Anyuta called me to the phone. “Who’s calling?” I asked. “Someone from the editorial office, it seems,” i.e., from the staff of Our Word, the newspaper that we, the former collaborators of Russian Word, having gathered in Odessa, began to publish on March 19 / April 1, since we felt fully assured that we would enjoy a more or less peaceful existence “until we could return to Moscow.” I picked up the receiver. “Who is it?” I asked. “Valentine Kataev. I’m rushing to tell you some unbelievable news: the French are leaving Odessa.”2 “How can this be, when are they going?” “This very minute.” “Have you lost your mind?” “I swear to you, it’s true. They’re fleeing in panic!”3
I ran out of the house and grabbed a cab, but I did not believe my eyes. Donkeys loaded with goods, French and Greek soldiers4 in field dress, gigs with all kinds of military property. When I got to the editorial office I found a telegram: “Clemençeau’s ministry is falling apart. Revolution and barricades in Paris. . . .”5
On this very day twelve years ago Vera and I came to Odessa en route to Palestine. What fantastic changes have occurred since that time! A dead, empty port; a dead, burned-out city. . . . Our children and grandchildren will not be able even to imagine the Russia in which we once lived (that is, what was it like yesterday) and which we ourselves did not value or understand—all its might, complexity, richness, and happiness. . . .
Just before I woke up this morning, I had a dream that someone was dying and that he had died. Very often now I see death in my dreams—either one of my friends is dying, or a close family member, especially my brother Yuly. I find it terrible even to think about him: how and on what is he getting along, and is he even still alive?6 The last time I heard something about him was on December 6/19 of last year. A letter from Moscow addressed to [my wife Vera] and dated August 10 / 23 arrived only today.
Incidentally, the Russian post office has been defunct for a long time now, since the summer of ’17, that is, from the very moment we followed European fashion and appointed our first minister of posts and telegraphs. It was also then that we got a minister of labor, something we also never had before—and Russia hasn’t done a lick of work since.7 Then, too, it was during the summer of ’17 that the Satan of Cain’s anger, of bloodlust, and of the most savage cruelty wafted over Russia while its people were extolling brotherhood, equality, and freedom. Everyone immediately became crazy, deranged. For the slightest infraction, everyone began yelling at everyone else: “I’m arresting you, you son of a bitch!”8
At the end of March in ’17 a soldier almost killed me on the Arbat because I had allowed myself a certain “freedom of speech” and cursed the newspaper Social Democrat9 because one of its vendors had thrust himself upon me. That scoundrel of a soldier knew perfectly well that he could do with me whatever he liked, and with complete impunity. The vendor, along with the crowd that surrounded us, immediately took the soldier’s side: “Really, comrade, are you so repulsed by a newspaper that is for the working masses? Does this mean you’re against the revolution?”
How all these revolutions are the same! During the French Revolution an entire abyss of new administrative institutions suddenly appeared. A whole flood of decrees and instructions sprang forth. The number of commissars—why were they called precisely commissars?—and all kinds of other authorities in general went on without end; committees, unions, and parties grew like mushrooms; and everyone “began devouring everyone else.” A completely new and special language came into being: “bombast mixed up with the coarsest abuse aimed at the vulgar remains of a dying tyranny. . . .”
One of the most distinguishing features of a revolution is the ravenous hunger for histrionics, dissembling, posturing, and puppet show. The ape has awakened in man.
Oh, these dreams about death? What a huge place death occupies in our short lives! And there is nothing to say about the years: day and night we live in an orgy of death. They keep talking in the name of some “bright future” that will supposedly issue forth from this satanic gloom. There have already appeared on this earth an entire legion of specialists and contractors who seek to fashion human well-being. As Ibsen’s bell ringer asks, “And in what year will it, this future come?”1 They always say: “This will be the last and decisive battle!”—The eternal fairy tale about a red bull.2
It poured cats and dogs last night. The day was grey, cold. The little tree that has grown green in our yard has burst into flower. But some damned spring this has been! . . . I do not feel like spring at all. After all, what is spring now?
Rumors and more rumors. We spend our lives in tense expectation (just as we did all last winter here in Odessa, and the winter before in Moscow when everyone kept expecting the Germans to come and save us). And this waiting around for something to come and resolve it all, and always in vain. But we will not go unscathed, of course; our souls will be maimed even if we survive. But what would everything be like if we did not have even these expectations, these hopes?
“Dear God, in what a time you have ordered me to be born!”3
Yesterday the poet Voloshin visited us for a long time. He had gotten into trouble because he had approached the Bolsheviks to help “decorate the city for the First of May.”4 I warned him: “Stay away from them. It would not only be stupid but also base for you to come to their aid, since they are well aware that you were in the opposing camp yesterday.” But Voloshin replied only with nonsense: “Art is outside of time, it is outside of politics. I will help decorate the city but only in my capacity as a poet and an artist.” Decorate what? Gallows, and his own to boot? But he took off to see them nonetheless. The next day Izvestia reported: “Voloshin came crawling to us; all kinds of bastards are hurrying to suck up to us. . . .” Now Voloshin wants to write a letter to the editor. He’s full of righteous indignation. And he’s acting even more stupidly than before.5
Still more rumors and rumors. Petersburg has been taken by the Finns;6 Kolchak has taken Syzran’ and Tsaritsyn.7 . . . Hindenburg is maybe going to Odessa, maybe to Moscow.8 . . . All of us keep waiting for help from someone, from something, from a miracle, from nature itself! We now go out daily along Nikolaevsky Boulevard9 to see if, God forbid, the French battleship has not left port. Mercifully it’s still there. It somehow looks gloomy in its berth, but its presence makes things easier to endure.
April 15 / 28, 1919
Ten months ago an individual by the name of Shpan1 came by to see me. He was an extremely mangy and ragged-looking individual, like a down-and-out traveling salesman. He offered to be my manager and promised that I should go with him to Nikolaev, Kharkov, and Kherson,2 where I would give a public reading of my works “every evening for a thousand rubles at a crack.” Today I met him on the street: he is now a commissar for theatrical affairs and a colleague of that crazy scoundrel Professor Shchepkin. He was clean-shaven and well off—everything about him said so—and dressed in a splendid English coat, thick, soft, and with a wide halfbelt in the back.
Looking out the windows we see a tramp with a rifle hanging from a rope on his shoulder—he is a “Red Policeman.” The entire street trembles at the sight of him in a way they never did at the thousands of the fiercest-looking policemen who were around before. What has happened? Roughly six hundred of “Grigoriev’s men”3 blew into town, bowlegged youths led by a pack of convicts and hooligans, who somehow captured an extremely well-to-do city with a million people in it! When they entered, everyone died of fright, they ran and hid. But where, for example, where are all those who so railed against the Volunteers4 a month ago?
Yesterday we took a walk at twilight. The heaviness in my soul is indescribable. The crowd that fills the streets is physically repulsive; I am sick to death of these animals. If only I could find some respite, if only I could hide somewhere, perhaps go to Australia! But all the highways and byways have been closed. It is an insane nightmare now to go down even Great Fountain Street: one cannot do so without permission, otherwise they’ll kill you like a dog.
We met L. I. Gal’bershtadt (a former contributor to Russian News and Russian Thought).5 He has “changed his colors.” Only yesterday he was an avid member of the White Guard, who cried (literally) when the French fled. Now he’s already got himself fixed up with the newspaper Voice of the Red Army Soldier.6 Like a thief, he whispered to us that he is “absolutely crushed” by the news coming from Europe: it seems that the Western powers have firmly decided not to interfere in any way in Russia’s internal affairs. . . . Yes, yes, this they see as “internal affairs,” even though scoundrels are pillaging and killing in broad daylight next door!
Voloshin visited us again this evening. It was monstrous! He said he had spent all day with Severnyi (Yuzefovich), the head of the local Cheka,7 who has a “soul like crystal.” That’s just what he said: “like crystal.”
Professor Evgeny Shchepkin, “the commissar for people’s education,” has given the governance of the university to “seven representatives of the revolutionary student body,” who, people say, are such scoundrels that one will never find others like them!8
Voice of the Red Army Soldier reports that “the Rumanians have penetrated deeply into Soviet Hungary.”9 We are beside ourselves with joy. Now here’s noninterference in “internal” matters for you. But after all, such interference has nothing to do with Russia.
“Blok hears Russia and the Revolution like the wind. . . .”1 O, what phrasemongerers! Rivers of blood, a sea of tears, but these do not faze him.
I often remember the indignation that greeted my supposedly all-black pictures of the Russian people. People are still indignant, but who are they now? The very same individuals who were reared and nursed on that very same literature which, for a hundred years, literally discredited all classes, that is, “the priest,” “the philistine,” the petty bourgeois, the bureaucrat, the policeman, the nobleman, the well-to-do peasant—in a word, everyone and everything, except the “people”—who were “always without a horse,” of course—as well as “youth” and tramps.
April 17 / 30, 1919
“The regime, old and rotten to the core, came crashing down, never to rise up again. . . . In a fiery, elemental surge, the people toppled the decayed throne of the Romanovs—forever.”
But if this is so, then why, from the very beginning of the March days, was everyone so insanely afraid that there would be a reaction, a restoration?
“All honor and glory to the madman who arouses humankind with a golden dream. . . .”2 How Gorky loved to bark this out! But all this dream ever did was to crack open the head of a factory owner, turn his pockets inside out, and put the garbage who worked for him in an even worse condition than the owner himself did.
“Revolutions are not made by hands in white gloves. . . . 3 So why should anyone be upset that counterrevolutions are done with an iron hand?
“Console yourselves for the sorrow of all Jerusalem!”4
Since breakfast I’ve been lying in bed with my eyes closed. I’m reading a book about Savina—simply for something to do. I’m completely indifferent to everything; my only feeling now is that this is not life. Then, I repeat, there is this exhausting waiting around for something to happen. It simply cannot go on like this: someone or something will save us—tomorrow, the day after, perhaps even tonight!
It’s been grey since morning, all day. It rained in the afternoon, and it really let loose in the evening. I’ve gone out twice to look at the crowds celebrating the First of May. I had to force myself; such spectacles literally crush my soul. “I feel people physically,” Tolstoy once wrote about himself. Me too. People did not understand this about Tolstoy, nor do they understand it about me; that is why they are often taken aback by my passion, “my likes and dislikes.” Even now the notions “people” and “proletariat” are only words: but for me they have always had eyes, mouths, and voices. Whenever I hear someone giving a speech at a meeting, I sense his entire body in the act.
Going out at noon, I saw a fair number of people trickling out onto Cathedral Square, but those already there were standing about senselessly, looking at the entire puppet show in an unusually dull way. There were, of course, the processions with red and black banners, and the “chariots” decked out in paper flowers, ribbons, and flags. Actors and actresses dressed in operalike folk costumes stood, sang, and comforted the “proletariat.” There were also “living tableaux” depicting the “might and beauty of the worker’s world,” of “brother” Communists with arms embraced, of “docile paysans,” and of “grim-faced” workers in leather aprons. In a word, everything was the way it was supposed to be, all staged by order of Moscow, courtesy of that reptile Lunacharsky. When will the Bolsheviks end this most base mockery of the mob, this repulsive buying of their souls and bellies? And when will they begin to show the least bit of sincerity, or at the very least a passionate enthusiasm for things? For example, the way Gorky used to get all unhinged and excited! I remember one Christmas when we were at his place in Capri5 and when he said (in the exaggerated dialect of people who live in Nizhny-Novgorod):
“Ladies and gentlemen, let’s stroll over to the piazza today; the public, the devil take them, will perform the most unusual routines—the whole piazza dances, you see. The kids scream like devils, they steal cookies from under the noses of the most venerable shopkeepers, they turn somersaults, and they blow on a thousand pipes. . . . There will also be, you see, the most interesting processions in which people from the various guilds will sing the most marvelous street songs.” And his green eyes welled up with tears.
I was at Catherine Square around twilight. It was gloomy and damp. Catherine’s monument6 was wrapped and bandaged from head to toe with dirty wet rags; and it was also entwined with branches and pasted over with red wooden stars. Across from it was the office of the Cheka decked out with red flags which, extremely filthy and droopy from the rain, cast thin and bloody reflections on the wet asphalt.
This evening almost the entire city was dark: a new insult, a new decree—do not dare even think about turning on the electricity, though it is available. But candles and kerosene are not to be found anywhere, and only here and there does one see wretched, gloomy lights peeking out from behind shutters: the glimmer of smoking homemade wicks. Who is responsible for this idiocy? In the final analysis it seems that the people themselves are to blame, since the decree was issued to please them.
I remember an old worker who was standing near the gates of the building where Odessa News7 used to be. It was the first day the Bolsheviks took control. Suddenly a crowd of boys jumped out from behind the gates with piles of freshly printed Izvestias, crying out, “The bourgeois in Odessa must contribute 500 million rubles to the government!”8 The worker began to wheeze, choking with anger and malicious joy. “That’s too little! That’s way too little!” he said. Of course, for him the Bolsheviks were the genuine “worker-peasant force.” They “were realizing the most cherished hopes of the people.” Everyone knows what kind of “hopes” these “people” have, for they have been called upon to rule the world and to take charge of all culture, law, honor, conscience, religion, and art.
“Without any annexations and contributions from Germany!”9 “That’s the way it should be!” “Five hundred million, five hundred billion from Russia!” “That’s too little!” “That’s way too little!”
The “left-wing,” all the “excesses” of the Revolution, are blaming the old regime. The Black Hundreds1 are pointing the finger at the Jews. But the people are not guilty! Soon this very people will blame everything on someone else—their neighbor or the Jew! “What, who me? Well if Ilya does it, so will I. After all, the Jews are always starting something. . . .”
April 19 / May 1, 1919
I went out for something to do, and also to look for food. People say that everything will be closed and that there will be nothing to buy. Sure enough, there is almost nothing in the stores that are still open. Sure enough, it has all vanished somewhere. By accident I happened to run into a pile of fish in a store on Sofiiskaya Street. But the price was outrageous—twenty-eight rubles a pound.
A. M. Fyodorov stopped by. He was very pleasant, though he kept complaining about his poverty. In reality he has lost his last asset—who will rent his summer cottage now? But then it is not his to rent out anymore since it is now the “property of the people.” He has worked his entire life and somehow managed to buy a truly valuable piece of land. Then he built a small house on it (and went into debt along the way)—but now it turns out that this home “belongs to the folk,” and that some “workers” will live there together with their families for the rest of their lives. One could hang oneself from outrage!
All day long there has been a persistent rumor that the Rumanians have taken Tiraspole, and that Mackensen is already in Chernovitsy, and that “Petrograd has already fallen.”2 Oh, how much everyone wants this to be true! But, of course, it’s all rubbish.
This evening I was with Professor Lazursky3 at the synagogue. Everything has been so terrifying and repulsive that one is drawn to the churches, the only havens still untouched by the flood of cruelty and dirt. Only there is too much opera going on in these places, and it is good to be there only for a while: wildly passionate wailing, sobbings which tell age-old sorrow, homelessness, the East, antiquity, wanderings—and the Divine One before Whom one can pour one’s soul first in a despairing and childlike mournful complaint that overwhelms the soul with its cry, and then in a gloomy and savagely threatening roar that penetrates everything beyond it.
Now all the homes are dark. The entire city is in darkness except for the thieves’ dens.4 There one can hear balalaikas and see shining chandeliers and walls covered with black banners with white skulls and the inscription: “Death, death to the bourgeois!”
I am writing by the light of a stinking kitchen lamp, using up the last of the kerosene. How sick, how outrageous this all is. My Capri friends, the Lunacharskys and the Gorkys, the guardians of Russian culture and art, express self-righteous anger when they warn New Life about abetting “tsarist sympathizers.” What would they do with me now if they caught me writing this criminal tract by a stinking kitchen lamp or trying to hide it in the crack of the ledge?
I remember how astute the doorman was in Moscow during the fall of ’17. Someone had just said: “No, forgive me if you will! But our duty was and still is to bring a Constituent Assembly to our country!”
The doorman was sitting by the gates and heard these passionate words. People were going by him and arguing. But he just shook his head sadly and said:
“God knows where these sons of bitches have really brought us!”
First it was the Mensheviks and their trucks, then the Bolsheviks and their armored cars. . . .
The truck: what a terrible symbol it has become for us! How many trucks have been part of our most burdensome and terrible memories! From the very first day, the Revolution has been tied to this roaring and stinking animal, filled to overflowing first with hysterical people and vulgar mobs of military deserters, and then with elitist-type convicts.
All the vulgarity of contemporary culture and its “social pathos” are embodied in the truck.
A man on the street was screaming, with spit coming out of his mouth. His eyes seemed particularly frenzied; his pince-nez was all askew. A small tie stuck out from behind a dirty cotton collar; his waistcoat was splattered with mud; his jacket hung from his shoulders and was too short and tight; and his hair had dandruff and was greasy, sweaty, and disheveled. . . . And people kept assuring me that this repulsive individual was supposedly seized by a “fiery selfless love for humanity” and a “thirst for beauty, justice, and good”!
What about the people who were listening to him?
On the street, a deserter stood all day long, doing nothing other than to mechanically wolf down the sunflower seeds in his fists. His coat was over his shoulders, his cap was perched on the back of his head. Stout, thin-legged, and quietly brazen, he just munched away, not saying anything except to ask an occasional question. But he didn’t believe any of the answers he was given, thinking it was all nonsense. He was so physically repulsive that it made one sick: his huge thighs were shoved into thick winter khakis; his eyelashes were like a calf’s. His lips were youthful but also beastly primitive, and milky from the seeds he was chewing.
From Tatishchev’s History of Russia:5
“Brothers against brothers, sons against fathers, slaves against masters; each one trying to kill the other from motives of self-interest, lust, and power; each one trying to rob the other of dignity; each one incapable of leading, but trying to be the smartest; each one wanting what the other one had and crying over what they have not. . . .”
Now these idiots are convinced that Russian history has undergone a great “shift,” and that this “shift” will lead to something completely new and unprecedented!
This “Russian history” has always been a tragedy (and a terrible one at that), but no one has the slightest understanding of it.
April 20 / May 3, 1919
I rushed to read the newspapers—but there is nothing noteworthy in them. “The enemy offensive is being met with equally strong resistance. . . .” But, in the end, who is this enemy?
The newspapers all have one and the same tone—a high-blown yet vulgar jargon—along with the same threats and the same frenzied boasting. But it is all so flat, so false, so transparent, and so obvious that one cannot believe a single word of it, the result being that the individual lives fully cut off from the world, as one from some Devil’s Island.
[Our maid] Anyuta says that already for two days now she cannot even get that terrible pealike bread which makes everyone around scream with colic.6 And precisely who is not getting any bread? Why, that very same proletariat who was having such a good time the day before yesterday. But the walls are plastered with posters saying: “Citizens! Everyone take up a sport!” It’s absolutely unbelievable, but completely true. Why sports? How did their cursed skulls come up with sports along with everything else?
Voloshin was here. Some people want to get him to the Crimea with the help of Nemits, the navy commissar and commander of the Black Sea Fleet. Incidentally, this Nemits is also a poet who, some say, “writes particularly good rondos and triolets.” They’re trying to come up with some secret “mission” to send Voloshin to Sevastopol’. The only problem, though, is that there’s nothing to send him down there for: Nemits’s entire navy consists of a single sailing ship, an old tub which can’t be sent out in any kind of weather.7
A flurry of rumors: Petrograd has been taken by General Gurko, Kolchak is near Moscow, and the Germans are about to enter Odessa. . . .8
How fiercely everyone yearns for the Bolsheviks to perish! There’s not the most terrible biblical punishment that we wouldn’t wish on them. If the devil himself would burst into the city and literally go about with Bolshevik blood up to his neck, half of Odessa would weep from joy.9
There is so much lying going around that I could scream. All my friends, all my acquaintances, people whom earlier I never would have thought of as liars, are now uttering falsehoods at every turn. They cannot help but lie; they cannot help but add to their own lies, their own flourishes to well-known falsehoods. And they all do so from an agonizing need that everything be just as they so fiercely desire. They rave on like they have a fever; and when I hear their rantings I take their words in greedily and become infected by them. Otherwise it seems that I won’t survive the week.
And every day this self-deception gains such momentum that by evening I go to bed as if in a drunken stupor, almost completely certain that something will happen during the night. I cross myself firmly and furiously. I pray with such force that my body hurts. It seems that God, or a miracle, or the heavenly powers cannot but help us. I fall asleep, exhausted from the unbelievable fervor with which I have begged for an end to the Bolsheviks. I send my soul over thousands of miles, into the night, the darkness, and the unknown so that I will be with my family and loved ones, and so that I can express my fear for them, my love for them, my agony for them, and my hope that God will save and protect them. Then suddenly in the middle of the night I jump up with a wildly beating heart: somewhere I hear the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun. Sometimes it is very close by, like a hail of stones on the roof. Here it is, I think. Something has finally happened; someone, perhaps, has attacked the city and will finally put an end to this cursed life!
But the next morning I again sober up with a heavy hangover. I rush to the newspapers; no, nothing has happened. Again I read all the same insolent and self-assured cries, all the same new “victories.” The sun is shining, people are going about, the stores have lines in front of them . . . and again I fall into a torpor, overwhelmed by hopelessness and the feeling that I have to face another long, empty day; no, not just one day but many days, empty, long, and good for nothing! Why bother living? For what? Why bother to do anything? In this world, in their world, in the world where the lout and the beast hold sway, I need nothing. . . . [People say:] “Our country has an extremely special psyche, one which people will write about for the next hundred years.” But what comfort do I take in that? After all, what do I care about a time when even the dust from my remains will be gone? These notes will not be worth anything. But who cares? The very same human being will be living through these hundred years—and I know very well how much he’s worth!
It’s night. I’m writing this in a slightly tipsy frame of mind. This evening A. V. Vas’kovsky stopped by. Like a conspirator, he opened the door and whispered all kinds of things, insisting that everything people had been saying during the day was the absolute truth. . . . Pyotr1 got so upset that his ears turned red. He crawled under the stairs and pulled out two bottles of wine. My nerves are so shot that I got tipsy from only two glasses of wine. I know that all these rumors are nonsense—but I believe them nonetheless. And so I am writing with cold and shaking hands. . . .
“Oh, revenge, revenge!”—Batyushkov wrote [to Gnedich] after the fire of Moscow in 1812.2
Savina wrote to her husband when she was in the Caucasus in the summer of ’15: “If God allows our dear little soldiers, our wondrous little knights to suffer such shame and grief—then we will be the ones who will be defeated!”
But what happened? Did our stupidity and ignorance come from the fact that we didn’t know the people, or because we didn’t want to know them? Both. At that time, though, people usually had a lot to gain by telling falsehoods for which they were somehow rewarded. “I believe in the Russian people,” someone would say, and applause would follow.
A well-known segment of society suffered particularly from such lying. People became so depraved in professing to be “friends of the people, of youth, and of all that is enlightened,” that they seemed completely sincere. Almost from adolescence on, I lived with such types—and I was constantly, every minute, outraged by their behavior since I could sense their hypocrisy, especially when they often would scream at me about someone else altogether:
“This one is lying, one can see right through him—has he ever given his entire life to the people!?”
One whom everyone called “an honest man” was a handsome old gent with glasses, a huge, white beard, and a soft hat. . . . But his brand of lying was very special, as if he did it almost unconsciously. The fact that he could overlay everyday life with sham emotions had, it seemed, long become second nature to him; but they were false nonetheless.
I can remember so many of these “liars”!
Indeed, this type would be an unusual subject for a novel, and a terrible novel at that.
How we lied to each other when we said that our “wondrous knights” were the best patriots in the world, that they were so very brave in battle and so very merciful with the conquered enemy!
“Does that mean that there was no one like this at all?”
No, there were some people. But who? There are two types of people among the folk. Ancient Rus’ resides in one; Chud and Merians in the other.3 Both are terribly fickle in emotion and appearance; they’re “real shaky,” as people used to say in the old days. The very folk have said about themselves: “We’re like the tree; from it comes both the icon or the club”; the result depends on circumstances, on who tends to the tree: Sergei Radonezhsky or Emel’ka Pugachev.
If I did not love, if I had not seen this “icon,” this Rus’, then why have I gone nearly insane all these years, why have I suffered so incessantly, so cruelly for my homeland? People say I only hate. But who are these people? In reality they are those who would readily spit on the folk—if the folk were not an impetus for their splendid feelings about life. Not only did they not know or want to know anything about the folk, they didn’t even take note of the faces of the cabbies who would carry them off to some Free Economic Society.4 Skabichevsky once confessed to me:
“I never saw the rye grow. Perhaps I saw it, but I didn’t pay any attention to it.”
But did Skabichevsky ever see the peasant as a separate individual? No, he knew only the words “folk” and “humanity.” Even the famous phrase “help for the hungry” came to us through literature and only from a desire to kick the government for the umpteenth time, to undermine it again.
It’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s the truth: if it were not for the misfortunes of the folk, thousands of our intellectuals would be profoundly unhappy people. How else could they have sat around and protested? What would they have cried and written about? Without the folk, life would not have been life for them.
The same thing happened during the war. In truth there was the same very cruel indifference to the people everywhere. The “little soldiers” were an object of ridicule. How everyone poked fun at their speech in the hospitals, how they indulged them with candy, rolls, and even ballet dances! And these same “little soldiers” went along with them and pretended to be terribly noble, meek, and painfully resigned. “What can you do, little sister, it is God’s will!” they said, agreeing with everything the nurses, and the ladies with the candy, and the reporters said. They lied when they said how much they enjoyed Gel’tser and the dances. (When I once asked a soldier what he thought was going on as he watched the performance, he answered: “Why, it’s the devil . . . they’re playing the devil, dressing up as goats. . . .”)
People were terribly indifferent to the folk during the war. They lied like criminals about the folk’s patriotic spirit, even when a child could not help seeing that the war repelled them. Where did this indifference come from? Why, from our terribly innate carelessness and frivolity, and from the fact that we were unaccustomed and unwilling to be serious when the times called upon us to be so. Just think how carelessly, haphazardly, and even gaily all of Russia looked upon the beginning of the Revolution as one of the greatest events in all history, and one of the greatest wars in the world!
Yes, before the Revolution we all lived (the peasants included) extremely freely, with rustic carefreeness; we all supposedly lived on a very rich estate, where even someone who was down and out, or who had shoes that were beyond repair, or who lay down after having taken off these shoes, did so in a fully relaxed way, since his needs were so elementary and limited.
“We all studied a little somehow and somewhere.” Yes, we did only those things that we had to, sometimes with great passion and talent, but for the most part any old way—only Petersburg wanted to do things right. We cared little for long daily routines; in truth, we shirked work terribly. And from this, incidentally, came our idealism—in essence, a very gentrylike idealism—our eternal opposition, our criticism of everyone and everything. After all, it was much easier to criticize than to set ourselves down to work. Take, for example, the following quotation:
“Oh, how I’m suffocating under Tsar Nicholas. I cannot be a bureaucrat and sit next to Akaky Akakievich5—a carriage, someone get me a carriage and get me out of here!”
Thus the Herzens, the Chatskys.6 And also Nikolka Seryi from my work The Village, [a peasant] who sits on a bench in a cold dark hut waiting for some “genuine” work to show up—and who continues to sit, wait, and languish. What an old Russian disease is all this languishing, this boredom, this babbling—this eternal hope that a frog with a magic ring will come and do it all for us, that we only have to step out onto the porch and throw a ringlet from one hand to another!
All of this is rooted in a type of nervous illness, and not at all in the famous “questions” that supposedly arise from our “depths.”
“I never did anything because I always wanted to do something special.”
This is Herzen’s confession.
I recall other remarkable lines of his:
“We are sobering up humanity. . . . We are its hangover. . . . We canonized humanity. . . . We canonized revolution. . . . We are sparing future generations sorrow by our disenchantment, our suffering. . . .”7
No, we’re still a long way from sobering up humanity.
I close my eyes and I keep seeing the image of a person as if alive before me: [he is an individual] with ribbons coming from a sailor’s cap, pants with huge bell-bottoms, and fancy slippers from Weiss’s8 on his feet; his teeth are firmly clenched, the muscles of his jaw twitch. . . . I will never forget this, even if it means that I will turn over in my grave!
“An Ultimatum from Rakovsky and Chicherin to Rumania!—Clear out of Bukovina and Bessarabia in 48 hours!”9 This is so improbable, so stupid (even if someone is poking fun at the mob) that it has even occurred to me to think: “Maybe this is all being done on someone’s order, the Germans, perhaps—and, with the intention to discredit the Communists, the revolutionaries, and in general, the Revolution on a daily basis?” Then I read—“From Victory to Victory—New Successes for the Valiant Red Army. Twenty-six Members of the Black Hundreds Have Been Shot in Odessa. . . .”
Izvestia—oh, the cursed orthography it uses!1—follows its headline about the ultimatum first with a published list of the names of the twenty-six who were shot yesterday, then with a small article on how well “work is going on” with the Odessa secret police and that “in general, there’s still a lot of work to do”; and, finally, with a proud declaration: “Yesterday Coal Obtained to Repair the Trains in Kiev.” Oh, happy day! And this right after an ultimatum!
But what if the Rumanians do not obey Rakovsky, then what? And how devilishly monotonous are all these clownish stunts! But perhaps it’s all just some coarse dramatic production, or a reason for someone to raise objections? But precisely who?
The “bourgeoisie” are just on the verge of affirming their faith in Petrograd. After all, they keep saying they have actually seen a telegram [saying] that Petrograd has been taken (after the English supposedly brought bread to the city).2 . . .
There is also a rumor that we will have the same type of savage plundering that is already going on in Kiev—that clothes and shoes will be “collected.”3
I recently read about the shooting of twenty-six men, but it didn’t seem to faze me.
I’m now in a stupor. Yes, twenty-six men, and not just any old time but yesterday, here, right next to me. How can I forget, how can I forgive the Russian people? But everything will be forgiven; everything will be forgotten. I only try to be horrified; for I’m not shocked by anything anymore. This is the hellish secret of the Bolsheviks—to kill all sensitivity. People live as best they can; their sensitivity and their imagination have been taken away from them, for the people have crossed the fatal line. Take the price of bread or beef, for example. “What? Three rubles a pound!” Then it goes up to a thousand—but there comes an end to the shock and screaming; stupor and passivity take their place. “What? Seven were hanged?!” “No, my dear, not seven, but seven hundred!” Already you are stunned beyond measure—you can still imagine seven being hanged, but try to imagine seven hundred, even seventy! . . .
At three o’clock—it has been raining all day—we took a walk. We met Polevitskaya and her husband [Schmidt]. “I so very much want a role in a mystery play; I so would like to play the Mother of God!” Oh, good Lord, good Lord! And to do all this and also be on the closest terms with bolshevism! But it’s been like that for a long time both in literature and in the theater.
I bought some matches at six rubles a box; a month ago they cost only fifty kopecks.4
When I go out, I feel as though I’m on the verge of getting seriously ill.
It’s now 8 p.m., but by “Soviet” time it’s already 10:30.5 Having returned home from my walk, I started closing the shutters of my apartment when I caught sight of a large flat moon that was completely golden-colored, and that was shining brightly through the new green leaves of the tree under my window. The western sky had already cleared, exquisite and still bright.
I had gone out at seven o’clock. It was raining constantly, like an evening in the fall. I went along Khersonskaya Street, then turned to go to Cathedral Square. It was still light out, but everything was already closed, including all the stores. A burdensome, anxious emptiness filled my soul. When I got to the square, the rain had stopped. So I made my way to the cathedral along the bright wet asphalt and under the cover of chestnut trees with their new green leaves and bright flowers.
I recalled the gloomy evening on the First of May. People were getting married in a cathedral; a women’s choir was singing. I entered; and, as always as of late, this churchly beauty, this island of the “old” world amidst a sea of the dirt, vileness, and baseness of the “new,” touched me in a most unusual way.
How the evening sky shone through the windows! The altar, the recesses of the church, the windows were all purplish blue—my favorite color. The dear little faces of the choir singers, the white veils on their heads, the little gold crosses on their foreheads, the music in their hands, and the golden lights of their small wax candles—this was all so charming that, looking and listening to them, I cried quite a bit. I went home with such a feeling of lightness, of youth. And together with that—such sadness, such pain!
When I returned, I ran into some people who were playing a piano and dancing both in the apartment of a policeman and also in our courtyard. I also saw our cook Marusya. In the twilight she seemed so very beautiful and alive. Her eyes were so bright that my heart momentarily recalled the distant, irretrievable charm I had once experienced sometime in my early youth, on a similar April evening in the village garden.
Last summer Marusya was living as a cook at our dacha, and for an entire month she kept hiding our bread in the kitchen and feeding it to her lover, a Bolshevik. I knew what was going on and did nothing. So much for any bloodthirstiness on my part; but that’s precisely the point: we cannot be like them, for once we are, that’s the end for us!
I am writing all this by the light of a lamp—the oil and the wick are in a jar. Darkness and soot. I’m ruining my eyesight.
In truth, we should have hanged ourselves a long time ago. We have been so beaten, muzzled, deprived of all rights, and stripped of all laws. We live as such vile slaves amidst incessant insults and slaps in the face!
How self-possessed
Are work-a-day horses
For they pay no need
To life’s dark forces!
These humorous lines were written by a young poet,6 a student who became a policeman last winter for ideological reasons but was later murdered by the Bolsheviks. A dear boy, may the kingdom of heaven be his! Yes, we too are very much “workaday horses.”
April 22 / May 5, 1919
I remember a loathsome day complete with rain, snow, and dirt. It was last year, the end of March in Moscow. A poor funeral procession was stretching its way across Kurdinskaya Square when suddenly this animal on a motorcycle came madly dashing out from Nikitskaya Street. Wearing a leather cap and jacket, he kept making threatening gestures, waving a huge revolver, and splashing mud on the coffin bearers:
“Get off the road!” he said.
The coffin bearers dashed to the side and, stumbling and jiggling the coffin, ran as fast as they could. An old lady was standing at the corner, and, having bent over, she was crying so bitterly that I automatically stopped and began to console her, to put her at ease. I muttered, “What will be, will be. God be with you!” Then I asked her, “Was the dead person a relative of yours?” The old lady paused for breath and dried her tears. Finally she said with difficulty:
“No . . . I don’t know him . . . But I envy him. . . .”
I remember other things. It was again Moscow, the end of March, the year before last. Prince Trubetskoy, big and fat, was shouting and theatrically shaking his small fists:
“Remember this, ladies and gentlemen: The Rissin’ boot will mercilessly crish these tender sp’rits of Rissin’ freedom! Everyone to the rescue!”
What the prince said was repeated by hundreds of thousands at that time. But they were silent about precisely whom they had to find to defend this “Russian freedom” for!
In the winter of ’18 these same hundreds of thousands hoped for salvation (but not for “Russian freedom”) precisely from the Germans. All of Moscow raved on about their coming.
Today is Monday. There are no newspapers, so I can rest from the insanity that comes from my reading them, an insanity that has grown since the very beginning of the war. Why am I so brutal with myself? Why do I tear my heart to shreds by reading them?
All these Peshekhonovs are so certain, so unusually and firmly assured, that the fate of Russia belongs only to them. When did that happen? When should they be punished, if only for the shame they brought on themselves when they paraded before the entire world during their six-month reign in ’17?7
I find this Bolshevik jargon intolerable. Generally speaking, what kind of jargon does our left speak? “Cynicism, bordering on gracefulness . . . Now a brunette, today a blonde . . . Reading with a passion . . . To conduct an interrogation with passion . . . Either-or: there is no in-between . . . To draw the proper conclusions . . . Whom it is necessary to inform . . . To stew in one’s own juice . . . The dexterity of hands . . . New-era lads . . .”
They also attempt to use high style with some supposedly high bitter irony (though it is not clear who or what is the target). It all sounds like Korolenko (especially in his letters). It’s not a “horse” but invariably a “Russian High-Stepper”; it’s not “I sat down to write” but “I mounted my Pegasus”; they’re not “policemen” but “uniforms of a sky-blue color.” Speaking about Korolenko, what a thundering article he wrote in defense of Rakovsky in Russian News in the summer of ’17!8
It is terrifyingly mystical in the evenings. It is still light out, but the clocks show something absurd, that it is night. The fountains are not lit, but all the “government” buildings, all the offices of the Cheka, and the theaters and clubs bearing the names of Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Lenin blaze forth brightly, like medusas or rosy glass stars.
All kinds of people rush off to these theaters and clubs (to see their own serf actors perform). They travel down the strangely empty but lighted streets in cars and cabbies, very often accompanied by dolled-up girls. They are the red aristocracy: sailors with huge revolvers in their belts, pickpockets, criminal villains, and shaved dandies in service jackets, depraved-looking riding breeches, and dandylike shoes with the inevitable spurs. All have gold teeth and big, dark, cocainelike eyes. . . .
But the afternoon is also petrifying. This whole huge town does not live; it stays home and goes out but little. It feels it has been conquered by an allegedly special type of people who seem much more terrible than our ancestors, the Pechenegs.9 But these conquerors only stagger, trade at hawkers’ stands, spit out sunflower seeds, and “swear in the foulest language.”
Deribasovskaya Street is host to two groups of people: one bunch amuses itself by accompanying the coffin of some hoodlum, who is invariably being called a “fallen warrior” (and who lies in a red coffin, preceded by an orchestra and hundreds of red and black banners); the other group appears to turn dark as they play on their accordions and dance and cry out:
“Hey, my little apple,
Where are you rolling along?”
Generally speaking, as soon as a city becomes “red,” the crowd that fills the streets changes suddenly and sharply. There is a new assortment of faces; the street becomes transformed. How such faces affected me in Moscow! It was because of them that I left there.
It is now the same in Odessa—from that very holidaylike day when the “revolutionary people’s army” marched into town, and when, even from the horses of cabbies, red bows and ribbons burned like fire.
There is nothing simple or ordinary about these faces. They are almost all so extremely and sharply repulsive, so frightening in their evil dullness, that they constitute a threatening, lackeylike challenge to everyone and everything.
This is already the third year this monstrous thing has been going on. A third year of only baseness, only dirt, only brutality. If only for a laugh, if only for fun, one wishes for something that is not even good but just simply ordinary, simply different!
“No wholesale making fun of the people!”
The “Whites,” of course, are fair game; but the people, the Revolution, are always being forgiven. “It’s all just excesses,” people say.
Regarding the Whites, whom the people have profaned, assaulted, and murdered, and from whom they have taken everything away—their homeland, their native cradles and graves, their mothers, fathers, and sisters—none of these things, of course, can be seen as “excesses.”
“Revolution is an elemental force. . . .”
Earthquake, plague, cholera are also elemental forces. No one extols them, though; no one canonizes them; no one overcomes them. And the Revolution is always “deepening.”
“The people who gave us Pushkin, Tolstoy.”
But the Whites are not people, they say.
“The nobility took in Saltychikha, advocates of serfdom, and other diehards. . . .” What everlasting baseness—to pull the wool over people’s eyes and to include Saltychikha, this most ordinary madwoman.
But what about the Decembrists, the famous Moscow University of the ’30s and ’40s, the conquerors and colonizers of the Caucasus, the Westerners and the Slavophiles, the agents of the “era of the Great Reforms,” the “repentant noblemen,” the first members of “The People’s Will,” the government Duma? What about the editors of the well-known journals?1 And all the greats of Russian literature? And its heroes? No other country in the world can lay claim to such nobility.
“The disintegration of the Whites . . .” they say.
What monstrous nerve to talk like this after the unprecedented world “disintegration” that marked the appearance of the Reds.
But, to tell the truth, many things arise from stupidity. Tolstoy used to say that nine-tenths of human folly can be explained exclusively by stupidity.
“When I was young,” he would say, “we had a friend, a poor fellow, who once, with his last pennies, suddenly bought a windup metal canary. We cracked our heads trying to explain this stupid act, until we recalled that our friend was simply very stupid.”
April 23 / May 6, 1919
Every morning I make an effort to dress quietly, to overcome my impatience to read the newspapers—but all in vain. And in vain I again try to do so today. It is cold and rainy, but I again run out into the slime and again waste five whole kopecks to get the news. What is going on in Petersburg? What about the ultimatum to the Rumanians? Of course, there is not a word about one or the other. But here is an important item: “Kolchak must not see the Volga!”2 This is followed by stories that a “Provisional Worker-Peasant Government” has been formed in Bessarabia,3 and that Nansen is begging “The Council of Four”4 for bread for Russia where “hundreds of thousands are dying monthly from hunger and disease.” Abrashka the Accordion Player (Reginin from Exchange News)5 continues to amuse the members of the Red Army with such ditties as “Kolchak jumps as if hit/And from fright, he takes a shit,” along with pieces of news: “Blockades in Paris, the old henchman Clemençeau in panic”; the Bulgarian Communist Kasabov has “declared war on France”;6 and the last item—this is literally what was said—a French dispatch boat arrived in the port of Odessa yesterday, but “the blockade continues, and the French have been abandoning even their sailing vessels. . . .”7
Everyone in town is surprised by the behavior of the French; they all run to Nikolaevsky Boulevard to look at the French torpedo boat, looking grey in the distance on a completely empty sea; and they shake in fear as they think: God forbid that it leave! Everyone seems to think that the ship is some kind of a protector, and that, should extreme savagery break out around us, the torpedo boat will start shooting . . . but the people also think that, should it leave, that means the end of everything, that there will be all kinds of horror, and that the world will be completely destroyed. . . .
Voloshin was here all evening. He had high praise for the navy commissar Nemits—“he sees and believes in the ongoing union and building of Russia.” Voloshin also read from his translations of Verhaeren. Again I think—not for the first time—that Verhaeren is a great talent; but, having read ten or so of his poems, I begin to suffocate from his devilishly monotonous devices, his wild hyperboles, and the insane “Bolshevik” pressure that he exerts on the reader’s imagination.
Russian literature has become extremely depraved over the past few decades. The street and the mob have begun to play a very great role in it. . . . Everything—and especially literature—has gone out into the street, has joined up with it, and has fallen under its influence. And the street corrupts and rankles, because it becomes so terribly unrestrained in its praises when it is catered to. Russian literature now has only “geniuses.” An amazing harvest! The genius Bryusov, the genius Gorky, the genius Igor Severyanin, Blok, Bely. . . . How can one stay calm when someone can become a genius so quickly and easily? Anyone can fight his way through, dazzle the mob, and call attention to himself.
Take Voloshin, for instance. The day before yesterday he called Russia the “Angel of Revenge,”8 who had “to stab a maiden’s heart with the ecstasy of murder and to pierce a child’s soul with bloody dreams.” Yesterday he was a member of the White Guard, but today he is ready to sing the praises of the Bolsheviks. For the past few days he has tried to drum the following into my head: The worse it gets, the better it will be; for nine seraphims are descending to earth and are entering into us so as to reconcile us with crucifixion and burning, and to transform us into new, tempered, and enlightened beings. I advised Voloshin to choose someone a bit more stupid for such conversations.
A. K. [Alexei Konstantinovich] Tolstoy once wrote, “When I recall the beauty of our history before the cursed Mongols came, I want to throw myself on the ground and roll about in despair.”9 Yesterday Russian literature had Pushkins and Tolstoys, but now it has almost only “cursed Mongols.”
Nighttime, the same day
The last time I was in Petersburg was in early April ’17.1 Then something unimaginable had just happened in the world. One of the very greatest countries on earth was thrown to the full whim of fate—and not just at any time but during a very great world war. The trenches still stretched for three thousand miles in the west, but they had already become simple pits. The deed was done, and in a way that was simply unprecedented and absurd. A power that had extended over three million miles, and that had comprised an armed horde, an army of millions of men,2 was transferred into the hands of “commissars,” of journalists such as Sobol’ and Yordansky. But more awesome was the fact that the magnificent, centuries-old life that had reigned throughout the entire great expanse of Russia was suddenly cut short and replaced by a bewildering existence, one that was rooted in a pointless, holidaylike atmosphere and in an unnatural abandonment of everything that human society had lived by.
Having arrived in Petersburg, I stepped out of the train car and began walking around the station. There, in Petersburg, things seemed even more terrible than in Moscow. It seemed as though even greater numbers of people had absolutely no idea of what to do and were roaming about the station in a completely senseless way. I walked out to the entranceway to hail a cabbie; but he also did not know what to do—whether he should take me or not—as well as what to charge me for the ride.
“To the Europe Hotel,” I said.3
He thought a bit and answered randomly: “Twenty rubles.”
The cost was completely out of line for the times, but I agreed, got in, and took off—but, as I traveled around, I did not recognize Petersburg.
Life had already stopped in Moscow. Its new rulers, though, had come up with an imitation of it, an existence that was insane, chaotic, and fevered, and that was rooted in some allegedly new structure, a new ritual, even a parade of life. The same thing was happening in Petersburg but even to a far greater degree. Meetings, assemblies, and mass gatherings were going on nonstop; appeals and decrees were being published one after another: a well-known “hot line” was operating at a frenzied pace—who wasn’t shouting, who wasn’t giving orders on this “line” in those days! Government cars sporting little red flags rushed along Nevsky Prospekt;4 trucks overflowing with people rumbled and roared; detachments with red banners marched to music in an excessively lively and precise manner. . . .
Nevsky was being trampled underfoot by a grey mob, soldiers with overcoats thrown over their shoulders, unemployed workers, strolling servants, and drunkards of all kinds. Vendors were selling cigarettes, red ribbons, obscene postcards, sweets, and anything else one might want from their stands. The sidewalks were filled with litter and piles of sunflowers; in the streets were frozen manure, humps, and holes. Halfway to my destination, the cabby suddenly told me what many bearded peasants were saying at that time:
“The people are now like cattle without a herdsman; they keep shitting all over and destroying themselves.”
I asked: “So what should be done?”
“What should be done?” he said. “There’s nothing one can do now. All we got now is an orgy going on. There’s no government at all.”
I looked around, at this Petersburg. . . . “Truly, there’s an orgy going on now.” But in the depths of my soul I still hoped for something. I still could not believe that the government had vanished.
But I also could not help believe.
In Petersburg I felt the following in a particularly lively way: there had been a great death in our huge, thousand-year-old home. This home had now been thrown open wide and filled with a huge holiday mob, which no longer saw anything sacred or forbidden in its rooms. Amidst this crowd were the heirs of the deceased, individuals dazed by cares and a need to give orders—which no one, though, obeyed. The crowd wandered from chamber to chamber, room to room. They never stopped nibbling or chewing on sunflower seeds; they only looked around and held their tongues, waiting for a better time to talk. But the heirs played up to the crowd, talking incessantly and assuring both the people and themselves that it was precisely they, the sovereign crowd, who, in their “sacred anger,” had broken the “chains” that had bound the deceased and the heirs. They kept instilling into the people as well as into themselves the idea that in no way did they consider themselves heirs—only temporary administrators who supposedly represented the crowd.
I went to the Field of Mars.5 The people there had just finished celebrating something that looked like a traditional sacrifice to the Revolution, but which was really a comic funeral for heroes who had allegedly fallen for freedom. Why was this necessary? What was this really, other than a mockery of the dead? The deceased were being deprived of an honest Christian burial. For some reason they were boarded up in red coffins and buried in the very center of town, right among the living! The comedy was done with great levity. Though the deceased were known to no one, their humble remains were mocked by high-blown speeches. From one end to the other, the great square had been dug up and trampled underfoot. It was disfigured with mounds of dirt; pierced with tall, bare poles topped with very long, thin black rags; and closed off by fences which had been hastily joined together and which, in their savage primitiveness, looked no less loathsome than the poles.6
I attended a very large gathering, the opening of an exhibit of Finnish art. What pictures we had then! Or so it seemed. The powers-that-be tried to have as many people as possible at the event. “All Petersburg” showed up, headed by several new ministers and well-known deputies of the Duma. They all simply begged the Finns to send Russia to the devil and to do whatever they pleased. I do not know any other way to describe the delight with which the Finns were addressed as regards “the dawn of freedom that shines over Finland.” And from the windows of that very grand building in which all of this took place, and which stood just across from the Field of Mars, I again looked out onto that terrible grave-like disgrace which it had become.
I was also present at a celebration honoring the very same Finland—a banquet given for their people after the opening of the exhibit. And, good Lord, the Homeric chaos that poured out of this banquet made everything else that I had seen in Petersburg seem harmonious and relevant! Everyone who attended the exhibit seemed alike—all “the flower of the Russian intelligentsia,” i.e., famous artists, actors, writers, social figures, new ministers, and one tall foreign representative, the ambassador of France himself.7 But the poet Mayakovsky prevailed over them all. I was sitting with Gorky and the Finnish artist Gallen. Mayakovsky immediately began acting up, coming over to our table without any invitation. He shoved a chair between us and began to eat from our plates and to drink from our glasses. Gallen’s eyes popped out of his head. It was almost as if he were looking at a horse that had just been led into the banquet hall. Gorky tittered. I moved aside. Mayakovsky noticed this.
“Do you really hate me that much?” he asked me in a merry way.
I said “no” quite freely; that would be too much of an honor for him. He was about to open his trenchlike mouth and ask me something else, but at that moment the minister of foreign affairs8 rose to give the official toast. Mayakovsky rushed over to him, to the middle of the table. Once there, he jumped up on a chair and began to yell something so obscene that the minister froze to the spot. He immediately got hold of himself and again proclaimed, “Ladies and gentlemen!” But Mayakovsky yelled something even fouler than before. The minister made a final and fruitless attempt to speak; then he shrugged his shoulders and sat down.
As soon as the minister had taken his seat, the French ambassador got up. Apparently he felt fully assured that the Russian hooligan would back off in confusion. He couldn’t have been more wrong! Mayakovsky drowned him out in a still shriller voice. Moreover, and to the ambassador’s extreme amazement, the entire hall suddenly erupted into a savage and senseless frenzy. Infected by Mayakovsky, everyone began to shout for no reason at all. They began to stamp their shoes on the floor and to beat their fists on the table. They laughed, howled, yelped, and grunted; they even turned off the electricity. Suddenly a Finnish artist, who looked like a shaved walrus, drowned out everyone else in a truly tragic wail. Drunk and dreadfully pale, he was apparently shaken to the depths of his soul by the extreme swinishness that was going on; and, wishing to protest, he began, with all his strength and literally with tears in his eyes, to scream out one of the few Russian words he knew:
“That’s too much! That’s too-o-o much! That’s too-o-o much!”
I happened to be at still another celebration in Petersburg—when Lenin came to town.9 “We bid you welcome!” Gorky wrote in a newspaper, acting as just one more claimant to the inheritance. But he was extremely serious and open in his claims. Lenin was met at the station by an honor guard and music; he was whisked off to one of the best Petersburg homes, which, of course, Gorky did not own.
“That’s too much?” But how else could one say it? After all, there were banquets going on all over the place, and the only sober ones at these feasts were the Lenins and the Mayakovskys.
One-eyed Polyphemus wished to devour the wandering Odysseus. Lenin and Mayakovsky (whom high school students prophetically dubbed “Idiot Polyphemovich”) were also both gluttonous and extremely powerful in their political one-eyedness. At one time everyone looked upon them as little more than street clowns. Not for nothing was Mayakovsky called a Futurist,1 that is, a man of the future. Without a doubt the polyphemiclike future of Russia belonged to the Mayakovskys and the Lenins. Mayakovsky instinctively sensed what the entire Russian feasting of those days had turned into, and recognized how splendidly Lenin could shut the mouths of all other tribunes as he spoke from Kshensinskaya’s balcony. Even more splendid was the fact that Mayakovsky himself could shut mouths, and at a banquet that was ready to sell us down the river to Finland!
The world was host to Easter, to spring, and to such splendid days, the likes of which ordinarily never occurred in Petersburg at that time of year. But an immense sadness held sway over anything else I felt then. Before I left Petersburg I visited the Peter and Paul Cathedral.2 Everything was wide open—the fortress gates, the cathedral doors. Idle people were roaming about everywhere, looking around and spitting out sunflower seeds. I walked around the cathedral, looked at where the tsars were buried, and, with a bow to the ground, I begged their forgiveness. Coming out onto the church porch, I stood for a long time in a state of shock: the entire endless universe that was Russia at springtime was opening up before my very attentive eyes. Spring and the Easter chimes called forth feelings of joy and of resurrection, but an immense grave yawned in the world. Death was in this spring, the final kiss. . . .
“The world did not know disappointment,” Herzen said, “until the great French Revolution; skepticism arrived together with the Republic of 1792.”3
As far as Russia is concerned, we will carry to the grave the greatest disappointment in the world.
I have just reread what I have written. No, we probably could still have saved ourselves. For the most part at that time, the depravity had only taken hold in the cities. The villages still had some sense, even shame. I recall notes I had written earlier, ones that I now pulled out and opened: for example, an excerpt from May 5/18, 1917:
“I was at a mill. There were many peasants present, several of them women. The noise of the mill failed to drown out the loud conversation that was going on. A peasant was leaning up against the lintel of the door. He was tall, but with hunched shoulders; his face had a dark black beard and a soft reddish hue that went up to his hair. A hat was pushed way down over the bridge of his nose. Having cocked his ear, he listened attentively to what [Bunin’s nephew] Kolya was saying; but he kept looking down at the ground.
“Kolya was saying that the soldiers were not obeying anyone and that they were leaving the front. A peasant suddenly roused himself and, fixing his shining black eyes at him, began speaking in an angry way:
“ ‘There you have it! There you have it! That’s those sons of bitches for you! Who dismissed them? Who needs ’em here? Those sons of bitches, they all should be arrested!’
“At that very moment a young soldier came riding by on a grey horse, singing and whistling. He was wearing khakis and a pair of quilted pants. The peasant rushed toward him, saying:
“ ‘There’s one! See how he goes? Who let him go? How did he get drafted? How did he get tricked into going?’
“The soldier was bowlegged, with a feigned carefree air. He got down, tied up the horse, and entered the mill.
“ ‘How come you won so few battles?’ the peasant shouted after him. ‘Tell me, your soldier’s hat, your soldier’s pants, did you put ’em on just to stay at home?’ (The soldier turned around with an awkward smile.) ‘You’d better not come around here at all, you son of a bitch, you bastard! I’ll come and take them myself. I’ll strip you of your pants and shoes, and then I’ll smash your head against a wall! I’m glad you got no bosses now, you bum! Why did your father and mother even bother feeding you?’
“The peasants caught up with the soldier, raising a collectively indignant cry. The soldier with the awkward smile tried to be scornful, but he merely shrugged his shoulders.”
April 24 / May 7, 1919
Yesterday evening I took it into my head to hide these notes so well that not even the devil himself could find them. Incidentally, the devil is now a little boy and his puppy. All the same, these notes can still be found, and they will be my ruin. Izvestia has already written about me: “It is long overdue to pay attention to this academician with the face of a Gogolian Christmas eve,4 to remember how he extolled the arrival of the French in Odessa!”5
I looked through the newspapers. But the same puppet show is going on. “Yesterday the Bessarabian worker-peasant government published a manifesto, declaring war against Rumania. But this is not the predatory war of imperialists. . . .” and so forth.6
There was also an article by Trotsky “on the necessity of finishing off Kolchak.” Of course, this is a primary agenda not only for Trotsky but for those who, wishing to destroy the “cursed past,” are also ready to destroy en masse—even if it be half the Russian people.
In Odessa the people have been waiting for the arrival of the Bolsheviks. “Ours are coming,” they say. Many everyday citizens are also waiting for them—they are tired of the change of governments; they want something stable and hope that life will be cheaper, too. But oh, how they keep rushing to get things! Well, that’s nothing; they’ll get used to it. It’s like the story of the old peasant who so wanted a pair of glasses that when he got them he literally burst into tears.
His neighbor said: “Makar, you’ve gone crazy! After all, you’ll go blind if they’re not the right ones for your eyes!”
“Who are you, a barin or something? You’re concerned about my glasses? That’s nothing, they’ll change with my eyes. . . .”
Voloshin told me that Severnyi, the son of Dr. Yuzefovich and head of the Odessa Cheka, told him: “I’ll never forgive myself for letting Kolchak escape. I once had him in my hands!”
I’ve never heard anything more offensive in my entire life!
Of Dybenko or “Torture-rack”7 . . . Chekhov once told me: “Now here’s a great name for a sailor: ‘Cat-crusher.’ ”
Dybenko is better than “Cat-crusher.”
Yesterday Shchepkina-Kupernik told me about Kollontai:
“I know her very well. She once resembled an angel. At the beginning of the day she would don the simplest little dress and gallop off to the workers’ slums—‘to go and work there,’ she said. And when she returned home, she took a bath and put on a small bluish shirt and, rushing off to bed with a box of candy in her hands, she would say to her girlfriend: ‘Well, dear, let’s chatter on now to our heart’s content!’ ”8
The judicial system and psychiatric medicine have long classed this (angelic-looking) type as belonging to inbred criminals and prostitutes.
From Izvestia:
“The peasants say: ‘Give us the commune, only deliver us from the Cadets. . . .’ ”9
A huge poster stands near the doors of the Political Administration Office. A red-skinned peasant woman, with an insanely savage snout and savagely bared teeth, is running full speed and sticking a pitchfork into the backside of a fleeing general. Blood pours forth from his rear. The inscription says:
“Don’t hanker, Denikin, for land that is not yours!”
“Don’t hanker” must mean “don’t think to bury yourself.”1
I swear by Michael the Archangel himself that I will never accept the Bolshevik orthography. If only because the human hand has never written anything like what is being written now in this script.
Just think, I still have to explain first to one, then to another, why I will not go and work for the Proletkult.2 I still must prove that I cannot sit down right next to the office of the Cheka, where, almost every hour, someone’s head is being broken, and enlighten some idiot with sweaty hands about “the latest achievements in the instrumentation of verse”! One should curse these lepers to the nth generation, even if they claim to be “intristed” in verse!
Generally speaking, what is most horrible, terrible, and repulsive now is not even the horrors and disgraces that the students of the Prolekult write, but the fact that I must first read through them and then argue with people as to whether they are good or bad. The absolute worst thing, though, is that I must prove to others that, for example, it is a thousand times better to die from hunger than to teach iambic verse and trochees to some idiot so that he can sing the praises of the Revolution, in which his colleagues rob, beat, rape, ruin churches, whip with belts taken from the backs of officers, and marry priests to horses!
Speaking about the Odessa Cheka, there is now a new way of shooting people—over the latrine hole.
Voloshin says that Severnyi, the head of the secret police here, has a “pure, crystallike soul”; but he also says that he just met the man several days ago—“in the living room of an attractive woman.”
Anyuta said:
“The Red Army have been chased from Russia.”3
I know, for I have already seen some of them. Today I came across yet another one—a thick-mugged, short-legged individual who, when he spoke, raised the left corner of his lip. I was at the end of Torgovaya Street, overlooking the port. He was lying with another soldier on a stone fence, cracking sunflower seeds with monkeylike quickness, and looking at me distrustfully from under his brows. Why was I, unhappy man that I am, there in the first place? I wanted to look at the empty berths, at the sea, but all the time feeling that hopes for rescue from that quarter were melting away!
I finished reading Bulgakov’s memoirs.4 Tolstoy once said to him:
“Schoolgirls who read Gorky and Andreev sincerely believe they cannot penetrate the depths of their writing. . . . I have just finished reading the prologue to Anathema—and it is complete nonsense. . . . What is going on in their heads, all these Bryusovs and Belys?”5
Chekhov also did not understand these writers. In public he would say they were “marvelous” writers, but at home he would laugh loudly: “What characters! They should be arrested!” And about Andreev: “First I’ll read two pages—and then I’ll need two hours of fresh air to clear my head!”
Tolstoy also said: “Today one is a literary success only by being stupid and insolent.”
He forgot to say that the critics were helping.
Who are they, these critics?
People turn to doctors for medical advice, lawyers for legal affairs, engineers to construct a bridge, and architects to build a home. But when it comes to art, anyone who wants to can be a critic, often people who, by nature, are completely alien to art. But these are the only ones that readers listen to. . . . Tolstoy’s opinion does not count for a thing—because it is the opinion of one who, first of all, possessed a profound critical sense. For example, the writing of each word in War and Peace was weighed most carefully; it underwent the most precise evaluation.
Even when I completely give up hope, I harbor a secret dream that there will come a day of revenge, a time for a universal damnation of these days. One cannot live without this hope. But how can one believe now, when such an unbelievably horrible truth has been revealed about humankind?
Everything will be forgotten and even extolled! And literature will be the first to help. It will soundly distort everything, just as it did with the French Revolution, when poets, the most noxious tribe on earth, outnumbered each conscientious writer with thousands of verse-idlers, degenerates, and charlatans.
Blessed are those who will visit this world
In its fatal moments!6
We complicate, we philosophize over everything, even over the unspeakable things that are now going on about us. With us it’s not a “rope” but a “thing to tie things up with,” just like Krylov’s wise man who jumped into a pit but continued to expound upon things once he was there.7 For example, we are still arguing about Blok: are his drunkards who killed a street girl really apostles or something less?8 Mikhryutka,9 who shattered a Venetian mirror with a club, is invariably our version of a Scythian, a Hun, and we take great comfort in affixing this label to him.
Generally speaking, we have been poisoned by the literary approach to life. For example, look at what we’ve done to the very great and colorful life that Russia lived in the last century. We have smashed it and broken it up into decades—the twenties, the thirties, the forties, the sixties—each decade defined by its literary hero: Chatsky, Onegin, Pechorin, Bazarov.1 . . . It would make a cat laugh, especially when one recalls that these heroes were eighteen, nineteen, or, at the most, twenty years old! . . .
The newspapers are calling for a crusade to Europe. I remember the fall of ’14, a meeting of Moscow intellectuals at the Juridical Society.2 Gorky, green from excitement, said in a speech:
“I fear a Russian victory because our savage country will have its hundred-million-man belly fall on Europe!”
Now the belly is a Bolshevik one, but Gorky is no longer afraid.
The newspapers have also issued a “warning”: “Due to a complete lack of fuel, there will soon be no electricity.” Thus in one month they have brought chaos to everything: no factories, no railroads, no trams, no water, no bread, no clothes—no nothing!
Yes, yes—“Seven thin cows will devour seven fat ones, but they themselves will not become fat.”3
Now (it’s 11 p.m.) I open the window and look out onto the street. The moon hangs low behind the houses, there is not a soul in sight. It’s so quiet that one can hear, somewhere on the street, a dog gnawing on a bone. But where did it get a bone? Look at what we’ve come to—we’re even surprised to find a bone!
I’m reading The Precipice.4 It is long but very intelligent and forceful; but I have to force myself to read it—since I find these Mark Volokhovs5 so repulsive. How many hooligans have descended from this Mark! “Why are you creeping into someone else’s garden and eating their apples?” “But what does this mean: ‘someone else’s garden or apples’? Why can’t I eat when I feel like it?” Mark is a brilliant creation, one that is the remarkable business of artists. An individual captures, distills, and embodies a type, one that was supposed to dissolve into thin air. But sometimes his presence and influence increase a hundredfold—in complete disregard of what his portrait was supposed to represent. Goncharov wanted to poke fun at the remnants of knighthood. He created a figure who never existed in life but who was the catalyst for hundreds of Don Quixotes to spring into existence. Goncharov wanted to castigate all the things that were associated with Mark, but he wound up giving birth to thousands of Marks who took their beginnings not from life but from books.
Generally speaking, how does one distinguish between that which is real and that which books, the theater, and films give us? Most likely, the people who have taken part in my life and who have had an impact upon me are fewer in number than the heroes of Shakespeare and Tolstoy. Others have allowed Sherlock Holmes to enter their lives, while some maid has been captivated by some woman whom she saw in an automobile on film.
April 25 / May 8, 1919
Late yesterday evening some people, together with the “commissar” of our home, came to measure the width, length, and height of all our rooms in order “to consolidate the proletariat.” These damn monkeys are measuring all the rooms in the city and are creating havoc wherever they go! I didn’t say a word. I silently lay on the couch while they measured all around me, but I got so upset from this new insult that my heart started to flutter and my veins pulsated in a sickly way on my forehead. This will not be good for my heart. I used to have a good heart, but I wonder about it now!
The “commissar” of our home became a commissar only because he was the youngest person among all the occupants in our building and because he came from a completely humble calling. He accepted the office out of fear. He’s a modest, shy individual, and he now shakes at the mere mention of the “revolutionary tribunal.” He runs through the entire building, begging us to fulfill the decrees. How these villains are able to instill fear and terror into people! How they take every opportunity to emphasize and parade their savagery! I get a sharp pain next to my left nipple whenever I hear words like “revolutionary tribunal.” Why “commissar,” why “tribunal,” why not simply “court”? All because when the Bolsheviks take cover under such sacred revolutionary words, they can bravely wade in blood up to their knees. Thanks to such words, even the most intelligent and decent revolutionaries can become indignant over everyday pillaging, robbery, and murder. They know perfectly well that they should tie up and drag a bum into the police station because he has seized a pedestrian by the throat in ordinary daylight. By the same token, though, they choke from ecstasy before this tramp if he does the same thing in so-called “revolutionary” times, because he has the fullest right to do so.
As I was finishing writing the above words—I heard a knock at the front door which immediately turned into frantic rapping. I opened the door—and again it was the commissar with a mob of his friends and members of the Red Army. With hurried vulgarity they demanded that I hand over to them any extra mattresses. I said I didn’t have any extra ones. They came in, looked around, and left. Again my head became stiff, my heart started fluttering, and my arms and legs shook from outrage, from insult.
I suddenly heard music coming from the courtyard. A roving Jew wearing a hat, a woman, and a German-type accordion. They were playing a polka—how strange all this is now, how inopportune!
The day is sunny but almost as cold as yesterday. There are clouds, but the sky is blue and the tree in the courtyard is already thick, dark green, and resplendent.
In the courtyard where the mattresses are being collected, cooks scream (about us): “That’s fine, that’s quite all right. Let them sleep on shingles and boards for a while!”
Kataev was here (he is a young writer). The cynicism of today’s young people is unbelievable. He told me, “For a hundred thousand rubles, I’ll kill anyone you want. I want to eat well, I want to have a nice hat, an excellent pair of shoes. . . .”
I went out to take a walk with him. Suddenly my entire being was momentarily taken up with the enchantment of spring, whose coming, for the first time in my life, I had not yet completely felt. I also felt that my vision had suddenly widened physically and spiritually, and that it was unusually powerful and clear. Deribasovskaya Street seemed unusually short, and the buildings bordering it unusually close. The statue of Catherine, all wrapped up in rags, Levashov’s house where the Cheka were, and the sea—all were small, flat, like the palms of my hands. Suddenly I realized clearly, vigorously, dispassionately—without any sorrow or fear but only with a vibrant despair—that everything going on in Odessa and in all of Russia was heading for an abyss.
When I left my home, I heard the janitor saying to someone:
“Oh, these Communists, they’ll steal beds to the last bastard. They’d rob their own father—swindle him with moonshine and pay him off with cigarettes!”
Everything is this way, and the lunacy is genuine, though it is surprising that everyone I meet affirms this—especially when one considers what happened to me (as if on purpose) on Pushkinskaya Street: an automobile rushed madly toward me from the station. In it, amidst a pile of friends, was an absolutely rabid-looking student with a rifle in his hands. Everything about him was harried-looking. His dilated eyes were fixed savagely forward; he was extremely thin; the features of his face were incredibly thin and sharp; the ends of a red hood fluttered in the wind behind him.
Generally speaking, one rarely sees students these days, but this one was rushing off somewhere, all in tatters. He was wearing a dirty nightshirt under an old overcoat that was flung open wide. The cap on his disheveled head was faded; the shoes on his feet were worn through; and a rifle, its barrel downward, hung from his shoulder. Incidentally, the devil knows if he really was a student.
Everything else is just as unreal. For example, it just so happened that a detachment of soldiers was coming out of the gates of what used to be the Crimea Hotel (located across from where the Cheka is) at the same time a group of women was crossing the bridge there. The soldiers stopped suddenly, turned in their direction, and took a piss, laughing as they did so. And what about the huge poster that hangs on the wall outside the police station? Someone has drawn a series of steps, and on the highest one is the picture of a throne from which blood flows in rivers. At the bottom is the inscription:
Thrones covered with the people’s blood
But we’ll stain our enemies scarlet!
And on the square next to the Duma6 the rostrums for the First of May still assault the eye with their red color. Farther on, something incomprehensibly foul, enigmatic, and complex rises high in the distance. This something, held together by boards and apparently conforming to some Futurist design, is daubed with paint in every way possible. It is an entire edifice, narrowing at the top and graced with gates all around. Posters again hang all along Deribasovskaya Street: two workers are turning a press, under which lies a flattened bourgeois. Golden coins pour forth in ribbons from his mouth and ass. And the mob walking about? First of all, how filthy they are! How many old, unbelievably soiled soldiers’ overcoats, how many reddish brown leg-wrappings on their feet, how many greasy caps on their lice-ridden heads—all looking as though they had been used to sweep up the street! And I’m seized with horror when I think about how many people are going about in clothes, stripped from the corpses, of those who have already been murdered!
The members of the Red Army display a key trait—their dissoluteness, their lack of discipline. Their teeth have a cigarette between them, their eyes are cloudy but insolent, their caps are perched way back on their heads, and a clump of hair falls on their foreheads. They are dressed in some kind of collective rags. Some wear a full-dress uniform from the ’70s; some, for no reason at all, have red riding breeches along with an infantryman’s overcoat and a huge overfashioned saber.
Sentinels sit on chairs next to the entrances of confiscated homes, and in the most tortuous poses. Sometimes a plain tramp sits there with a revolver in his belt; a German cutlass hangs from one side, a dagger from the other.
In order to have hot water in the city, these “builders of the new life” have ordered that Odessa’s famous elevated railway be torn down,7 i.e., the many-miled wooden track that runs to the port and is used to deliver bread. People are complaining in Izvestia: “Everybody is taking apart the railway!” Branches and trees are also being lopped off and chopped down—already two rows of bare trunks stick out on many streets. Members of the Red Guard also heat samovars by breaking the butts of their guns into chips.
When I got home I looked through a book of pulp fiction that had been lying round here for a long time: The Library of the Working Masses. Songs of Folk Anger. Odessa, 1917. Yes, the inscription that was on the poster is also here:
Thrones covered with the people’s blood
But it will stain our enemies scarlet,
Heartless revenge on all our foes
And death to capitalist leeches and harlots!
There is the “Worker’s Marseillaise,” the “Warsaw Anthem,” the “Internationale,” the “Hymn of the Volunteers,” “The Red Banner”8 . . . and it is all so malicious, so unbelievably bloody, so sickeningly false, so flat and unbelievably wretched:
Vicious whirlwinds give us pause
But all our warriors we will call
The banner for the worker’s cause
We’ll raise both proud and tall. . . .
And we’ll begin a new life
And make plowshares from swords
By sending our enemies to the knife
And killing the enemy hordes. . . .
Good God, what has happened! What a terribly abnormal thing has happened, the result of entire generations of boys and girls who memorized Ivanyukov and Marx by heart; who published their writings in secret; who disseminated them in gatherings of the Red Cross9 and under the guise of “literature”; who shamefully pretended they were dying of love for all the Pakhoms and Sidors;1 and who constantly inflamed themselves with hatred for the nobleman, the factory owner, the philistine, and all “bloodsuckers, spiders, obscurants, and knights of darkness and violence!”
Yes, it’s universal insanity. What is in people’s heads? The other day I went walking along Elizavetinskaya Street. Some guards were sitting next to the doorway of a confiscated home and playing with the bolts of their guns. One said to another:
“And all of Petersburg will be under a glass ceiling . . . so there’ll be no snow, no rain, no nothin’. . . .”
Not long ago, out on the street, I met Professor Shchepkin, the commissar for education. He was moving slowly, his eyes fixed forward and with a dull, idiotic look on his face. He was wearing a dust-ridden cape about his shoulders with a huge greasy stain on the back. His hat was also so filthy that it made one sick to look at it. His paper collar was also very dirty; it was propped up by a huge pus-filled boil on the back of his neck that looked like a volcano about to erupt. His tie was old, thick, and died a red oily color.
People have been talking about how Fel’dman delivered a speech before some peasant “deputies”:
“Comrades, soon the power of the soviets will take over the entire world!”
Suddenly a voice rang out from the crowd: “Not a chance!”
Fel’dman asked angrily:
“And why not?”
“Because you haven’t got all the Jews yet!”
That’s nothing to worry about; [the Bolsheviks] have got all the Shchepkins they need.
April 26 / May 9, 1919
I woke up at six because my heart was beating so strongly.
Going to get the newspapers, I heard an old lady cursing. The small fish in her basket had cost her eighty rubles!
The newspapers from Moscow report: Shipments of firewood on all railways have fallen by 50 percent. . . . The People’s Commissars have decided to restore works of art. . . . India has been seized by bolshevism.2
Izvestia has been answering letters from its readers:
“Dear Citizen Guberman, So you think that the war with those bastards Kolchak and Denikin is fratricide?”
“Dear Comrade A., Praises to Russia, even if they be to a Soviet Russia, transcend a Marxist approach to the question.”
“Dear Citizeness Glikman, Have you still not understood that the way of life in which, with money, one can have everything, but without it one can die from hunger—that way of life is gone forever?”
We took a walk to Nikolaevsky Boulevard. Along the way we saw white springlike clouds and a huge and clear vista—the empty berths in port, the charming colors of distant shores, and the bright blue ripples of the sea. . . . We ran into Osipovich and [Semyon] Yushkevich.3 Again it’s one and the same thing. With a look of indifference, they said quickly, in a whisper: “Tiraspole has been taken by the Germans and the Rumanians—this is already a fact. Petersburg too has fallen. . . .”4
At three this afternoon our maid Anyuta came in with a frightened look on her face: “Is it true that the Germans are entering the city?5 Everybody is saying they have supposedly surrounded the city. They themselves got the Bolsheviks started; now they’ve been ordered to destroy them, but it will take them fifteen years before they surrender all of them to us. Ain’t that great!”
What’s all this? Most likely savage nonsense, but just the same I got so upset that my hands grew cold and shook. To calm myself down I began reading a manuscript by Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, his memoirs of Dragomanov, Ziber, and P. Lavrov.6 They’re all marvelous people, like everyone who appears in Kulikovsky’s works. He writes: “The Creator made these living souls from the best ethers. . . .” Good Lord! What a thing to read in my old age!
I then read Renan. “L’homme fut des milliers d’anneès un fou, aprés avoir été des milliers d’anneés un animal.”7
April 27 / May 10, 1919
From Izvestia: “The counterrevolutionaries are sitting and are thinking up great thoughts about how to confuse proletarians and Communists. . . . Their narrow foreheads are covered with wrinkles, their mouths are open, and yellowing teeth peek out from under the thick, baggy lips of these Fedula Fedulyches. . . . Good God, they are either comedians or simple tavern rogues and swindlers. . . .”
From The Voice of the Red Army, a lushly written piece:
“Comrade Podvoisky has ordered that Rumania be invaded. . . . The Rumanian scallywags, along with their bloody king,8 have seized the young Soviet Hungarian republic by the throat in order to snuff out the revolution that has seized all of Europe.”
A resolution from Voznesensk:9
“We, the members of the Red Army and citizens of Voznesensk who are fighting for the liberation of the world, protest against boorish anti-Semitism!”
From Kiev there is news that “the statue of Alexander the II1 is slated to be destroyed.” A typical thing to do these days. As early as March ’17 people were beginning to tear down eagles2 and coats of arms. . . .
Again there is a rumor that Petersburg has fallen, Budapest too. Such rumors, though, always start off in the same hackneyed way: “A friend of a friend visited me and said . . .”
Great news, Radetsky and Koiransky came by, all excited.
“Grigoriev is coming to Odessa!” they said.
“What Grigoriev?”
“The very same one who chased the allies out of Odessa.3 Now he has joined up with Makhno and is beating the Bolsheviks. And Zelyonyi is heading for Kiev.4 ‘Beat the Jews and the Communists for the faith and fatherland!’ that’s what they say. I myself am a Jew, so to speak, but let the devil himself come at this point. Yesterday Shpital’nikov told me that he was a democrat who was against all intervention and interference. I replied: ‘And what would you say against such intervention and interference if there were an all-Russian pogrom against the Jews?’ ”
April 28 / May 11, 1919
It is so!
“In order to offset rumors circulating about the city, the headquarters of the third Ukrainian Soviet army hereby announces that the Cossack chieftan Grigoriev, having gathered a mob of followers, has proclaimed himself as hetman and has declared war on the Soviet government. . . .”
Next an order from Antonov-Ovseenko:5
“The White Guard bastard is seeking to thwart Red power and to exterminate it in a peaceful settlement. . . . This base traitor of the homeland, this wretched servant of our Cains, must be destroyed like a mad dog. . . . He must be crushed and ground into the dirt, like worms into the earth which he has defiled. . . .”
Then an appeal to the members of the military-revolutionary soviet:
“To one and all! To the children of the working classes of the socialist Ukraine! Grigoriev—an adventurer and a drunkard, the servant of the gang of the old regime, the lackey of priests, landowners, and mama’s boys—has taken off his mask and has surrounded himself with a flock of black ravens with greasy mugs. . . . He preaches that Bolsheviks want to lock everyone up in a commune . . . even though the Communists are not forcing anyone to join. We are only making clear what everyone already knows, that is, that it is not the business of the Bolsheviks to crucify Christ because, after all, He, as the Savior, taught the same thing as we do. He too rebelled against the rich. . . . Such an absurd provocation was written in a drunken stupor; and, of course, it can have no effect. . . . Hurrah! Down with the adventurist who has taken it into his head to bathe in the blood of starving workers. . . . We must catch these traitors and pimps and hand them over to the workers and peasants. . . .” It was signed: “Comrades Dyatko, Golubenko, and Shchadenko.” No one signs letters with the word “comrade.” It would be like me finishing a letter with “Mr. Bunin.”
Everyone’s been upset the entire morning. [Semyon] Yushkevich was here. He very much fears a pogrom against the Jews. The anti-Semitism in town is fierce.
Still more—an excerpt from “local life”: Yesterday, by order of the military-revolutionary tribunal, eighteen counterrevolutionaries were shot.
The savagery and panic brings one to despair. “All bourgeois must be registered.” How is one to understand this?
Yesterday I went out at sunset and ran into Rozenthal, who told me that someone had thrown a bomb on Cathedral Square. I took a walk with him to visit Lazrusky. There, from the windows of his apartment, I saw a rose-colored west amidst pale blue clouds. It was already twilight when I headed back on Deribasovskaya Street. On one side there were a great many people, but it was empty on the other. Angry soldiers kept crying out: “Comrades, to the other side of the street!” Several automobiles rushed by madly; they were followed by an ambulance with an anxious siren, two riders on horseback, and a dog who barked after them. . . . No one was allowed to go farther.
Thomas, our doorman, informed me that the day after tomorrow will “truly be the end of the world”: it will be the “Day of Peaceful Insurrection,” when every last bourgeois will be stripped of his things.
April 30 / May 13, 1919
It has been a terrible morning! I went to visit D. [Shpital’nikov]. He was wearing two shirts and two pairs of pants. He said that the Day of Peaceful Insurrection has already begun, that the pillaging was in full swing, and that he was afraid that someone would take his second pair of pants.
We went out together. A detachment of horsemen were going along Deribasovskaya Street. In their midst was an automobile with a horn that wailed the highest notes. We ran into Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, who said: “Rumors lacerate my soul; there’s been shooting all night long; now people are being robbed.”
It is three o’clock. I again take a walk into town: the Day of Peaceful Insurrection has suddenly been called off. It seems that the workers themselves have revolted. They were about to be robbed too, because they had helped themselves to piles of stuff earlier. The insurrectionists were met with firing, boiling water, and rocks.
Today we had a terrible storm with a downpour and hail. I took cover under the gates. Trucks, filled with comrades armed with rifles, were going by with a roar. Two soldiers walked under the gates. One was a big, hunched-over man with a cap on the back of his head. He was gobbling up a sausage, tearing pieces with his teeth while, with his left hand, he was slapping himself below the stomach.
“Here it is, here’s my commune!” he said. “This is what I said to him right off, ‘Don’t scream, your Jerusalem excellency. It’s hanging right below my belly.’. . .”
May 1 / 14, 1919
Everyone is in an anxious frame of mind, not only here in Odessa but in Kiev and in Moscow itself. Things have gotten so bad that Kamenev, as the plenipotentiary representative of the Soviet Ministry for Defense, has issued an appeal: “To one and all! One more push and worker-peasant power will conquer the world. At this very moment the traitor Grigoriev wants to stick a knife into the back of worker-peasant power.”6
The commissar of our building came by to verify how old I am. The powers-that-be want to recruit all bourgeois into a “rearguard militia.”
It has been cold all day long. This evening I went to visit [Semyon] Yushkevich. He’s been trying to establish a theater for his friends in some “military hotel”; but, as he’s afraid to go alone to the soviet to ask for this theater, he wants to involve me in all of this. He’s out of his mind! I returned home through the rain, through a dark and gloomy city. Here and there, girls and lads of the Red Army were laughing and cracking nuts.
May 2 / 15, 1919
Members of the Red Army in Odessa led a pogrom against the Jews in [the town] of Big Fountain.
Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky and the writer Kipen happened to be here and told me the details. Fourteen commissars and thirty Jews from among the common people were killed. Many stores were destroyed. The soldiers tore through at night, dragged the victims from their beds, and killed whomever they met. People ran into the steppe or rushed into the sea. They were chased after and fired upon—a genuine hunt, as it were.7 Kipen saved himself by accident—fortunately he had spent the night not in his home but at the White Flower sanitorium. At dawn a detachment of Red Army soldiers suddenly appeared. “Are there any Jews here?” they asked the watchman. “No, no Jews here.” “Swear what you’re saying is true!” The watchman swore, and they went on farther. Moisei Gutman, a cabby, was killed. He was a very dear man who moved us from our dacha last fall.
I went by the Duma today. It was very cold and grey. The sea was deserted, the port was dead. The French torpedo boat was far off in its berth, looking very small and somehow lonely, pitiful, and absurd—God knows why the French are staying around here.
What are they expecting, what are they going to do? A crowd of people was standing next to a cannon. Some were upset about the Day of Peaceful Insurrection; others were preaching boldly, passionately, and giving it good and hot to those who stood around.
I went along and thought. More accurately, I felt: “If only I could manage to get out of here and go somewhere, perhaps to Italy or to France. But it would be repulsive everywhere—for humankind itself has become repugnant! Life has forced us to feel so sharply, and to look at it, its soul, its loathsome body. What good were our former eyes—how little they saw, even mine!”
Now I’m out in the courtyard. There is night and darkness; rain is pouring down; there’s not a person in sight. All of the Kherson Province is in a state of siege. We dare not go out when it gets dark. I’m writing, sitting as though I’m in a fairy-tale dungeon: the entire room flickers with dusk and the fetid soot of the night light. On the table is a new appeal: “Comrades, take heed! We are bringing you the true light of socialism! Quit your drunken gangs, vanquish the parasites once and for all! Cast aside the strangler of the folk masses, the former excise officer, Grigoriev! For he has a weakness for the bottle and owns a home in Elizavetgrad!”8
May 3 / 16, 1919
I fight the tension, I try to get out from under it, this intolerable waiting for something to happen—and all in vain. It is especially horrible when I yearn for time to fly by as quickly as possible.
A resolution of the regiment bearing the name of one Starostin:
“We declare that we will collectively enter the struggle against the new uncrowned hangman, Grigoriev, who, like a spider, again wishes to suck all our energy in drunkenness and debauchery!”
The Odessa committee of the Russian People’s Government Alliance9 was arrested (sixteen people in all, including a professor); and they were all shot yesterday evening “because of their overt attempts to disturb the peaceful tranquility of the population.”
Imagine! They’re worried about the tranquility of the population!
We visited the Varshavskys. We returned home through the dark city; the streets were full of twilight but not as they are during afternoon or sunrise, though now one could hear the sounds of steps in a much sharper way.
May 4 / 17, 1919
The weather is clearing. The courtyard is under a blue sky, and the trees are showing a spring, festivelike splendor; behind it the wall of the house is dazzling white but spotted with dark shadows. A Red Army soldier rode into the yard and tied his stallion to the tree. The animal was black, with a wavy tail that fell to the ground, brilliant markings on his croup, and even grander ones on its back. In the living room, Evgeny [Bukovetsky] was playing the piano. Good God, how painful all this is!
We visited V. A. Rozenberg. He is working in a cooperative; he is living together with his wife in one room. We drank some weak tea and had some dried-up old raisins alongside a lamp that gave off little light. . . . Here’s an editor for you, the boss of Russian News! He spoke passionately about the “horrors of tsarist censorship!”1
May 5 / 18, 1919
In a dream I saw myself on a sea that was milky white in the light blue night. I also saw the pale rose lights of a ship; and I said to myself that I had to remember that the lights were pale rose. What does this all mean?
A notice from the Voice of the Red Army:
“Death to counterrevolutionaries who take part in pogroms! The enemies of the people wish to drown the revolution in Jewish blood. They want the masters to live in storybook mansions and the peasants to go back to the fields, to tending sores on their cows, and to bending their backs for parasites and lazybones. . . .”
A millionaire is getting married in our courtyard. He came in a carriage. They had forty bottles of wine for the feast. Just two months ago a bottle cost twenty-five rubles. What must it cost now, especially when it is forbidden and one can get it only on the sly!
An article by Podvoisky appeared in Kievan Izvestia:
“If the black jackals who are congregating in Rumania can fulfill their plans, then the fate of the world revolution will be decided. . . . The black band of scoundrels . . . The predatory talons of the Rumanian king and the landowners. . . .” Next an appeal by Rakovsky, which, incidentally, included this item: “Unfortunately the Ukrainian village is just the same as it was in Gogol’s time: ignorant, anti-Semitic, illiterate. . . . Commissars bribe, extort, get drunk, and violate the law at every turn. . . . Soviet workers win and lose thousands at cards, and distilleries support the drunkenness.”
And then there’s a new piece by Gorky, a speech that he gave the other day at an assembly of the Third International2 in Moscow. Its title was “The Day of the Great Lie.”3 Its contents:
“Yesterday was the day of the great lie. The final day of its power.
“From time immemorial, people, like spiders, have carefully spun a strong web of discreet bourgeois life, which, more and more, sustains itself by lies and greediness. The most cynical falsehood is considered to be an unshakable truth: the individual must live off the flesh and blood of the person next to him.
“Only yesterday this kind of thinking led to the insanity of the all-European war, to its nightmarish glow which immediately illuminated all the shocking nakedness of this ancient lie.
“The patience of the peoples of the world was exhausted; the rottenness of existence was destroyed by an explosive force; and life cannot be restored to its old forms.
“This present day burns so brightly; that is why the shadows are so thick!
“Today the great work of liberation has begun. People are being freed from the powerful iron web of the past. The work is like childbirth: terrifying and difficult. . . .
“It just so happens that the Russian people are leading all other nations in this decisive battle. Only yesterday the entire world looked upon them as half-savages, but today these half-savages are like old, experienced warriors. With passion and courage they are going either to victory or death.
“What is now going on in Russia must be understood as a gigantic attempt to realize, in life, in action, the great ideas and words that the teachers of humankind, the sages of Europe have uttered.
“And if upright Russian revolutionaries, individuals who are surrounded by enemies and tormented by hunger, if they are vanquished, then the consequences for this terrible catastrophe will rest heavily on the shoulders of all the revolutionaries of Europe, on the entire working class.
“But the honest heart will not waver, the honest thought will be alien to tempting compromise, the honest hand will not tire of working—the Russian worker believes that his brothers in Europe will not allow Russia to be strangled, that it will not permit the resurrection of everything that is breathing its last, that is disappearing and will disappear!”
And here’s a clipping from [the newspaper] New Life, dated February 12 / 25, 1918:
“We have before us a company of adventurists who—because of their own personal interests and because the agony of their dying autocracy has been extended for several weeks—are ready to betray, in a most shameful way, the interests of socialism and the interests of the Russian proletariat, the very same one in whose name they commit outrages on the vacant throne of the Romanovs!”
The only thing we live for is to gather in secret and to exchange news with each other. For us the main source for such counterintelligence is on Khersonskaya Street, at the home of Shchepkina-Kupernik. News from the Bureau of the Ukrainian Press finds its way there. Yesterday it supposedly received a decoded telegram: Petersburg has been taken by the English.4 Grigoriev is surrounding Odessa and has issued a universal decree in which he acknowledges the soviets but only those that “have fewer than 4 percent of those people who crucified Christ.” News from Kiev has supposedly stopped coming completely, since the peasants are being swayed by Grigoriev’s slogans5 and are destroying railways for thousands of miles.
I am not a strong believer in their “ideology.” Most likely this will later be seen as a “battle of the people with the Bolsheviks” and be placed on the same level as that of the Volunteer Movement. This is terrible. Of course, communism and socialism are for peasants what the saddle is for the cow; both will drive the people to frenzy. But, most of all, what is going on now is akin to the “thief-like wandering” that Rus’ has so loved since the beginning of time, i.e., the wish for the free, pirate’s way of life, a wish that has now seized hold of hundreds of thousands of people who are corrupt in every way possible, who have broken away from or have grown unaccustomed to home and work. Less than a decade ago I wrote an epitaph to my stories about the people and their souls, using the words of Iv. Aksakov: “Ancient Rus’ has not yet passed us by!”
I was correct to have done so. Klyuchevsky notes the extreme “repetitiveness” of Russian history. But to our supreme misfortune, no one has paid any attention to this repetitiveness. The “liberation movement” came into being with lighthearted amazement, with indispensable, obligatory optimism, and with all kinds of meanings and interpretations: “warriors” and writers of realistic populist literature thought one thing; others saw events with a certain kind of mysticism. Everyone “put laurel wreaths on lice-covered heads,” to use Dostoevsky’s words.6 Herzen was a thousand times right when he said:
“We have divorced ourselves profoundly from existence. . . . We have become capricious, we do not want to know reality, we continually excite ourselves with our dreams. . . . We endure the punishment of people who come forth from our country’s present. . . . Our misfortune has been that we have abrogated the theoretical and practical aspects of life. . . .”7
Incidentally, many have found it—and continue to find it—simply disadvantageous not to divorce themselves from reality. They needed “young people” and “lice-covered heads” as cannon fodder. They burned incense before youth because youth were passionate; they did likewise to the peasant because he was dark and “unstable.” Did many people not know that revolution is only a bloody game in which people merely trade places and which, in the final analysis, only ends up with their going from the frying pan into the fire—even if they manage temporarily to sit, feast, and raise hell where their masters used to be?
Extremely clever and cunning ringleaders knew full well what they were doing when they prepared this insulting sign: “Freedom, brotherhood, equality, socialism, and communism!” And this sign will hang for a long time—as long as these ringleaders do not weigh too heavily on the necks of the people. Of course, thousands of boys and girls have cried out this ditty in a rather simplehearted way:
The folk, the people, the nation
Will lead us to salvation!
And, of course, most of them have sung this rather silly thing with their deep bass voices:
The cliff and the colossus
All that Stepan8 thought for us
He’ll retell to the brave ones
Who’ll glow like phosphorus. . . .
“But what was all this after all?” Dostoevsky asked. “It was the most innocent, sweet, and liberal chatter. . . . We were captivated not by socialism but by the emotional side of socialism. . . .” But this too is the underground after all; and in this underground the right person knows exactly where he must direct his steps and which qualities of the Russian people are extremely useful to him. And this Stepan knew very well.
“A people—young, unbalanced, perpetually dissatisfied, and spiritually dark—readily ceded to disturbances, waverings, and instability. . . . And they did it again in an extremely grand way. . . . The spirit of materialism, of unrestrained will, of coarse self-interest wafted destructively over Rus’. . . . The hands of the righteous were paralyzed, and those of evil men were untied to commit all kinds of atrocities. . . . Crowds of outcasts, the scum of society, devastated their own homes under the banners of the leaders, impostors, hypocrites: under the guise of leading degenerates, criminals, and ambitious people. . . .”
This is from Solovyov, about the Time of Troubles.9 Here is an excerpt from Kostomarov, about Sten’ka Razin:
“The people followed Sten’ka. They were deceived and inflamed by him, for they did not understand much of what he had in mind. . . . There were promises, bribes, lures, but always with traps all along the way. . . . All types of Asians and pagans rose up—Zyrians, Mordavians, Chuvash, Cheremis, and Bashkirs1—people who rose up and slashed, not even knowing why they did so. . . . There were Sten’ka’s ‘flattering letters’2—‘I will go to the boyars, the officials, and other powers-to-be, and I will bring about equality among them. . . .’3
“But full-scaled pillaging was the result. . . . Sten’ka, his associates, and his armies were drunk from wine and blood. . . . They hated laws, society, religion, everything that checked personal incentive. . . . They breathed vengeance and envy. . . . They were fugitives, idlers, and thieves. . . . All these bastards and scum Sten’ka promised freedom in everything; but in reality he made them debtors, complete slaves. He tortured and executed them for the slightest disobedience; he honored everyone with the term ‘brother,’ and so they all fell prostrate before him. . . .”
Don’t think the Lenins of this world didn’t know and count on all this!4
From Red Army Star:5 “Wilson, one of the greatest scoundrels and spongers among the bourgeois, is demanding an invasion of the north of Russia.6 Our answer: Get your paws off! We will go as one to prove to the dumbfounded world. . . . Any lackeys will know in their souls that they have fallen overboard and that they are far beyond our anchor of salvation.”
Joyous rumors—Nikolaev7 has been taken; Grigoriev is close at hand. . . .
May 8 / 21, 1919
The Odessa Communist8 has published an entire poem about Grigoriev:
At night the tired Hetman sleeps
But he has a “terrible” dream
He sees a rifle, the proletariat.
And he’s ready to scream.
The folk have a burning glance,
And for the while they keep mum.
But then they horrify “pan” by saying:
“Know that you are traitor, scum.
You think you’ve figured out
How to feather your bed,
But the golden Hetman crown
Will not rest on your head!”
I went out to get a shave and had to take cover from the rain under an awning on Ekaterinskaya Street. Next to me stood an individual eating a radish. He was one of those who “firmly holds the red banner of world revolution in his calloused hands,” i.e., a peasant from around Odessa. He kept complaining that the harvest was good but that he and others had planted too little. He very much feared the Bolsheviks: “Let the bastard Grigoriev come and lock ’em up!” He said this about twenty times. At the end of Elizavetskaya Street I saw about a hundred soldiers who had assembled on the sidewalk and with rifles and machine guns in their hands. I turned off on Khersonskaya Street, and there on the corner of Preobrazhenskaya, I saw the same thing. . . . There are rumors all over town that the “revolution has begun!” One could simply get sick from all these endless lies.
We took a walk after dinner. I cannot express how tired I am of Odessa; I’m simply devoured by angst. And there’s absolutely no way for me to get out of here! Gloomy blue clouds stand on the horizon. The sounds of wild music and dancing blast from the windows of a splendid home next to the police station, across from Catherine’s statue. I also hear the despairing cry of one of the dancers, as if he had been stabbed with a knife: a-ah!—the cry of a drunken savage. All the surrounding homes have their lights on; everyone is busy doing something.
It’s evening. But I don’t dare turn on any lights or go outside! Oh, how terrible these nights are!
From the Odessa Communist:
“The Ochakovsky Garrison9 realizes that, as evidenced by the assault of the arrogant drunkard Grigoriev, the counterrevolution never rests, and also that it has raised its head with complete impudence by pouring poison into the heart of the worker and the peasant, and by setting one nation against another. Also, the drunkard Grigoriev’s slogan: ‘Beat the Jews and save the Ukraine!’ has brought terrible harm to the Red Army and hastened the demise of the socialist Revolution! And so we affirm: to send our curses to the drunkard Grigoriev and to his nationalist friends!”
The Odessa Communist also writes: “Having discussed the question of the members of the White Guard whom we have taken captive, we demand that they be shot forthwith, for otherwise they will continue to carry on their dark work and to spill blood in vain. Already way too much blood has been shed, thanks to the capitalists and their stooges!”
Alongside was this doggerel:
The Communist worker
Knows where power is:
For if he loves labor
A living spring is his . . .
He sees bastards rot,
He doesn’t accept nations.
He’ll give all he’s got
To Soviet organizations!
May 6 / 19, 1919
Ioann, i.e., Ivan the peasant from Tambov, the saint and miracle worker who lived not so very long ago—in the last century—once prayed before the icon of Prelate Dmitry Rostovsky, the great and well-known bishop, and said to him: “Mityushka,1 dear one, hear me!”
This very same Ioann was tall but somewhat hunched. His face was swarthy, his beard was thin, and his hair long and sparse. He would compose simplehearted verse like this:
Doors won’t open
And windows are far
For those who don’t pray
To God their tsar.
So return to him
Wherever you are,
Like a shining star. . . .
Where has all this gone, what has happened to it all?2
“The holiest of callings,” the calling of the “human individual,” has been discredited as never before. The Russian person has also been discredited—no matter what, no matter where our eyes fall, it’s as if Nevsky’s “ice crusades”3 had never happened! How terrible are the old Russian chronicles: records of endless sedition, insatiable self-interest, ferocious struggles for power, deceptive kissings of the cross, flights to Lithuania and to the Crimea “for the rising up of non-Christians for their own native ancestral homes,” the obsequious missives to one another (“I bow to the earth, as your faithful slave”) only to fool someone, to hurl evil and shameless reproaches from one brother to another. . . . You have abandoned words that belong to another time:
“Shame and disgrace to you: You wish to abandon your father’s blessings, your native graves, your sacred fatherland, and your Orthodox faith in our Lord, Jesus Christ!”4
May 9 / 22, 1919
At night I am plagued by anxious dreams about trains and seas and very pretty landscapes, but they leave me morbid and sad—and tensely expecting something. . . . I also see a huge talking horse. It was saying something related to my poem on Svyatogor and Il’ya,5 but in an ancient language; and it was all so terrible that I woke up and mentally repeated these verses for a long time:
On long-maned, shaggy steeds
With stirrups, gold and wide,
Two brothers rode—one younger, one older,
One, two, three days in stride.
They see a trough in the field,
A coffin and a big one at that;
Deep, with hollowed-out oak,
And a roof, black, heavy, and flat.
Svyatogor opens it, lies down
And jokes: “It fits me just fine!
But help me out, Il’ya,
For today’s not my time!”
Il’ya, laughing, grabs the top
And pulls up with all his might,
But he soon finds he has to stop;
For the black lid’s way too tight.
A voice from the coffin—“Get a sword!”
Il’ya goes for it—but seized by spite
That fills his mind and heart
He hacks the coffin to pieces
But cannot break it apart.
For wherever he strikes
There appears an iron brace;
Svyatogor in his gravelike crypt
Will never lift his face!
I wrote this in ’16.
We too are crawling into a gravelike trough, but we do so merrily, in a joking frame of mind. . . .
Again the newspapers say: “Death to the drunkard Grigoriev!” Further on, though, they adopt a more serious tone: “This is not the time for words! The issue at hand is neither the dictatorship of the proletariat nor the building of socialism, but the most elementary achievements of October. . . . On one hand, the peasants affirm that they will struggle for world revolution with every drop of their blood; but, on the other, everyone knows that they have attacked Soviet trains and have killed our best comrades with axes and pitchforks. . . .”
A new list of people who have been shot has been published—“by way of conducting affairs in the life of the red terror.” Then a small article:
“It was a happy and joyous time at Club Trotsky. The main hall of what used to be the Garrison Assembly, where whole groups of generals formerly huddled together, was now filled to overflowing with members of the Red Army. The closing music portion of the evening was especially successful. People first sang the ‘International.’ Then Comrade Kronkardi stirred and delighted the audience by imitating a barking dog, a chirping chick, a singing nightingale, right up to a bad-tempered pig. . . .”
The “chirping” of a chick and the “song of a nightingale” and other animals—which, it turns out, everyone there also did “right up to” the pig—this is something I think even the devil himself could not write up. Why was the pig the only “bad-tempered” creature there, and why was the “International” performed right before Kronkardi began imitating such an animal?
Of course, all this is “pornographic literature.” But isn’t this “porn”—its swinelike and international aspects—the essence of almost all Russia, of almost all Russian life, of almost all Russian writing? And will it ever be possible for us to break from this “porn”? But then, isn’t all this pornographic writing tied by blood to almost all of the “new” Russian literature? After all, people have long published—not just anywhere but in “leading” journals—things like the following:
The garden flowers have already bloomed . . .
The flax has been turned into rope . . .
I go to sort our kernels of wheat . . .
But for that woman you must not mope . . .
For now isn’t it good all around?
One should not set the queen to rest . . .
I’d describe it all, but can words be found?
The decline and destruction of the word, with its hidden sense and its sound and weight, have been going on in literature for a long time.
“Are you going home?” I once asked the writer Osipovich as I was saying farewell to him on the street.
He answered: “Ain’t goin’ nowhere!”
But what happened when I told him that one can’t say that in Russian? He didn’t understand, for he had no feeling for the language.
“And how am I supposed to say it? You’d probably say: ‘No, I’m not going anywhere?’ What’s the difference?”
He did not understand the difference. Of course, he’s got an excuse; he’s from Odessa. He can also be excused if only because, in the end, he had an inkling that he had done something wrong and promised to remember that one must say, “No, I’m not going anywhere.”
Now, though, our literature has such an incredible number of self-assured, impudent fellows who pass themselves off as all-knowing connoisseurs of the word! How many champions do we have of an ancient (“fresh and juicy”) folk tongue? How many individuals are there now who never say a simple word but who exhaust themselves with their arch-Russianness!
The latter is now becoming quite fashionable (the result of all these international “searchings,” that is, of all these Young Turk imitations of every kind of Western model). How many writers of poetry and prose are creating a nauseating Russian language! How many of them are taking the most precious folk legends, fairy tales, and “golden words” and shamelessly passing them off as their own! How many of them are defiling these legends, tales, and words with their own retellings and additions, rooting about in regional dictionaries and coming up with the most obscene arch-Russianness, a language that no one speaks now or ever spoke in old Russia, and that is even impossible to read! How our Moscow and Petersburg salons are host to all the Klyuevs and Esenins who even dress like pilgrims and nice Russian lads, but who sing through their nose about “dear little candles,” and “sweet little rivers,” or who pretend to be someone or something with their “sweet bold little heads”?
The Russian language is becoming fractured; the people have made it sick. I once asked a peasant what he fed his dog. He answered:
“What d’ya mean ‘what’? Nothin’. He eats whatever. I got an eatable dog.”
This happens to the language whenever the folk get the upper hand. But what if it gets the upper hand now?
May 10 / 23, 1919
From the newspapers: “Kolchak has lost Belebey6 and is flogging peasants to death. . . . Mikhail Romanov is riding with him.7 . . . They are traveling on an old troika: autocracy, orthodoxy, nationality.8 . . . They are conducting pogroms against the Jews and carrying vodka in their hands. . . . Kolchak has entered into the service of international predators . . . so that the cold-blooded, fattened hand of Lloyd George9 can cause an exhausted country to shudder. . . . Kolchak looks forward to the day that he’ll be able to drink the blood of the workers. . . .”
Next to this is an article scolding and threatening the Left SRS:1
“These hacks are becoming such fussy little prisses. For a while they’ve taken up dancing and are . . . even smearing their mugs with cold cream. But no matter how they clean themselves up, their faces still show the same kulaklike freckles. . . .”
The people who write these things are worried not only about the peasants who have been “beaten to death” by Kolchak but also about the Germans: “The vile comedy in Versailles is over, but even Scheidemann’s2 followers insist that the conditions set by the Allied fleecers and the bourgeois sharks are completely unacceptable. . . .”
We took a walk along Gimnazicheskaya Street. A charming springlike rain greeted us almost the entire way; and there was also a marvelous springlike sky among the storm clouds. But I almost fainted twice. I have to stop writing these notes; jotting them down, I irritate my heart even more.
Again there are rumors—now ten transports of what the people around here are calling the “c’lored’ ” troops (i.e., “colored” in Russian)3 are supposedly coming to rescue us.
A person who is rather close to Podvoisky says that “he’s a dim-witted seminarian with piglike eyes and a long nose, and that he is also a maniac when it comes to discipline.
May 11 / 24, 1919
Slogans in the classic Russian style:
“Forward, native sons, do not count the corpses around you!” One can conclude only one thing from the news of Grigoriev’s “pogrom”—that almost all of the Ukraine has been seized by Grigorievshchina.4
Yesterday people were saying that Trotsky himself had come to Odessa. But it turns out that he was in Kiev. “The arrival of the leader was an inspiration to all workers and peasants of the Ukraine. . . . The leader delivered a speech in the name of all the folk millions, at a time when the backbone of bourgeois confidence has been broken, and we hear the cracking in its voice. . . . The leader spoke to the people from the balcony. . . .”
I am now reading Le Notre.5 Saint-Just, Robespierre, Couthon6 . . . Lenin, Trotsky, Derzhinsky . . . Who are the most base, bloodthirsty, and vile? Our Muscovites, of course; nonetheless, those from Paris are right up there too.
Le Notre says that Couthon was a dictator, a very close associate of Robespierre, the Attila of Lyons, a legislator and a sadist, who sent thousands of absolutely innocent souls to the guillotine, “a passionate friend of the People and of Virtue”; and, as is also well known, a cripple who had lost the use of his legs. But how and under what circumstances did he lose his legs? It so happened that it was a rather shameless affair. He was spending the night with his mistress, a woman whose husband was out of town. Everything was going along splendidly until suddenly they heard a knock at the door and the steps of the returning husband. Couthon leapt out of bed, jumped out the window to the courtyard below—and landed in a cesspool. He stayed there till dawn, but he lost the use of his legs forever—and he was paralyzed for the rest of his life.7
People are saying that a pogrom against the Jews is going on in Nikolaev. Apparently it is far from fact that all the peasants of the Ukraine “are welcoming the arrival of the leader.”
The tone of the newspapers, though, is getting more strident and insolent. Was it all that long ago that their people were writing that “it is not the business of Bolsheviks to crucify Christ who, being the Savior, also rose up against the rich”? Now they are singing other songs. Here are several lines from the Odessa Communist:
“The spit of such a famous wizard as Jesus Christ must also have an appropriate magic force. Many people, who do not even recognize Christ’s miracles, continue to sentimentalize over the morality of his teaching, trying to show that the ‘truth’ of Christ is head and shoulders over their own moral worth. But in reality such a view is completely false and can be explained only by an ignorance of history and a lack of intellectual development.”
May 12 / 25, 1919
Again there are flags, processions. Again, there is a holiday—“a day of solidarity of the proletariat with the members of the Red army.” The place is rife with drunken soldiers, sailors, and tramps. . . .
Today they carried a corpse past us (the deceased was not a Bolshevik). “Blessed are those, O Lord, whom you have chosen and taken onto Yourself. . . .” Truly, the dead are the blessed ones.
The rumor is that Trotsky has arrived and that he “was greeted like a tsar.”8
May 14 / 27, 1919
“Kolchak and Mikhail Romanov are bringing vodka and pogroms to the people. . . .” Kolchak is in neither Nikolaev nor Elizavetgrad, but one reads this nonetheless:
“There is a savage pogrom against the Jews going on in Nikolaev. . . . Elizavetgrad has also suffered terribly at the hands of the dark masses. People are reckoning the material losses in the millions. Stores, private apartments, small shops, and even refreshment counters have been leveled. Soviet depots have also been destroyed. It will take Elizavetgrad many years to recover from this disaster!”
There’s more:
“The head of the soldiers who rose up in Odessa and then left it is threatening Ananiev—more than a thousand people have been killed and stores have been looted. . . .”
“A pogrom that is going against the Jews in Zhmerinka is just like the one that took place in Znamenka.9 . . .”
The Bloks of the world look upon all this and say, “The people have fallen under the sway of the music of the Revolution—listen, listen to the music of the Revolution!”