N mandelstam memories. Nadezhda Mandelstam - memories. last years of life

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam

Memories

The woman's face stared into the glass of the window, and a liquid of tears crawled over the glass, as if the woman kept them ready all the time.

Only that is strong, under which the blood will flow. Only they forgot, scoundrels, that it turns out to be strong not with those who shed blood, but with those whose blood is shed. Here it is - the law of blood on earth.

Platonov Dostoevsky. From notebooks

May night

Having slapped Alexei Tolstoy, O. M. immediately returned to Moscow and from there every day telephoned Anna Andreevna and begged her to come. She hesitated, he got angry. Having already gathered and bought a ticket, she thought, standing at the window. “Pray that this cup will pass you?” asked Punin, an intelligent, bilious and brilliant man. It was he, walking with Anna Andreevna along the Tretyakov Gallery, who suddenly said: "Now let's go see how they will take you to execution." So the poems appeared: “And then on the firewood, at dusk, To drown in manure snow. What crazy Surikov is My last to write the way? But she didn’t have to make this trip: “They hold you at the very end,” said Nikolai Nikolayevich Punin, and his face twitched with a tic. But in the end they forgot her and did not take her, but all her life she saw off her friends in their last way, including Luna.

Leva went to the station to meet Anna Andreevna - he was visiting us in those days. In vain we entrusted this simple task to him - he, of course, managed to miss his mother, and she was upset: everything was not going as usual. That year, Anna Andreevna often visited us, and even at the station she got used to hearing Mandelstam's first jokes. She remembered the angry “You drive at the speed of Anna Karenina”, when the train was late one day and - “Why are you dressed up like such a diver?” - it was raining in Leningrad, and she arrived in boots and a rubber raincoat with a hood, and in Moscow the sun was burning at full strength. When they met, they became cheerful and carefree, like a boy and a girl who met in the Poets' Workshop. "Push," I screamed. "I can't live with parrots!" But in May 1934 they did not have time to have fun.

The day dragged on painfully long. In the evening the interpreter Brodsky appeared and sat down so firmly that he could not be moved. In the house, even with a rolling ball - no food. O. M. went to the neighbors to get something for Anna Andreevna’s dinner ... Brodsky rushed after him, and we hoped that, left without a master, he would fade and leave. Soon O. M. returned with prey - one egg, but did not get rid of Brodsky. Once again, sitting in an armchair, Brodsky continued to list the favorite poems of his favorite poets - Sluchevsky and Polonsky, and he knew both our poetry and French poetry to the last thread. So he sat, quoted and recalled, and we understood the reason for this importunity only after midnight.

Arriving, Anna Andreevna stopped in our small kitchenette - the gas had not yet been installed, and I was preparing something like dinner in the corridor on a kerosene stove, and the inactive gas stove, out of respect for the guest, was covered with oilcloth and disguised as a table. The kitchen was called the temple. “Why are you lying around like an idol in your temple?” Narbut once asked, looking into Anna Andreevna’s kitchen. “It would be better if we went to some meeting and sat ...” So the kitchen became a temple, and we sat there together, leaving O. M. to be torn apart by the versified Brodsky, when suddenly, at about one in the morning, there was a distinct, unbearably expressive knock. “This is beyond Osei,” I said and went to open it.

Men were standing outside the door - it seemed to me that there were many of them - all in civilian coats. For some tiny fraction of a second, a hope flashed that this was not yet: the eye did not notice the uniform hidden under the carpeted coats. In fact, these carpet coats also served as a form, only camouflage, like pea coats once, but I didn’t know that yet.

Hope immediately dissipated as soon as the uninvited guests crossed the threshold.

Out of habit, I waited for “Hello!”, Or “Is this Mandelstam’s apartment?”, Or “At home?”, Or, finally, “Accept the telegram” ... stepped aside and let him into the house. But the nocturnal visitors of our era did not adhere to this ceremonial, as probably any secret police agents throughout the world and at all times. Without asking anything, without waiting for anything, without lingering on the threshold for a single moment, they penetrated with unheard-of dexterity and speed, pushing me aside, but not pushing me into the hallway, and the apartment was immediately filled with people. They were already checking documents and with a habitual, precise and well-designed movement, they stroked our thighs, probing our pockets to check if weapons were hidden.

O. M. came out of the large room. “Are you following me?” - he asked. The short agent, almost smiling, looked at him: "Your documents." O. M. took his passport out of his pocket.

After checking, the Chekist showed him a warrant. OM read it and nodded.

In their language it was called "night operation". As I later learned, they all firmly believed that on any night and in any of our homes they could meet with resistance. In their midst, romantic legends about nightly dangers were exaggerated to maintain the spirit. I myself heard a story about how Babel, shooting back, dangerously wounded one of "ours", as the narrator put it, the daughter of a major Chekist who advanced in 1937. For her, these legends were connected with concern for her father, who had gone to work at night, a kind-hearted and spoiled man who loved children and animals so much that he always kept a cat on his lap at home, and taught his daughter never to admit his guilt and stubbornly answer everything. "No". This cozy man with a cat could not forgive those under investigation that for some reason they confessed to all the charges against them. “Why did they do it? repeated the daughter after the father. “After all, by doing this they let themselves down and us!” ... And “we” meant those who came at night with warrants, interrogated and passed sentences, passing fascinating stories about night dangers to their friends during leisure hours. And the KGB legends about night passions remind me of a tiny hole in the skull of the cautious, intelligent, high-browed Babel, who in life probably did not hold a gun in his hands.

They entered our hushed, impoverished houses as if they were robbers' dens, like hazus, like secret laboratories where masked Carbonari make dynamite and are preparing to offer armed resistance. They entered us on the night of the thirteenth to the fourteenth of May, 1934.

After checking the documents, presenting a warrant and making sure that there would be no resistance, they proceeded to search. Brodsky sank heavily into an armchair and froze. Huge, like a wooden sculpture of some too wild people, he sat and sniffed, sniffed and snored, snored and sat. He looked angry and offended. I accidentally turned to him with something, asked, it seems, to find books on the shelves to give O.M. with me, but he cursed: “Let Mandelstam look for it himself,” and sniffled again. Towards morning, when we were already freely walking around the rooms and the tired Chekists did not even squint after us, Brodsky suddenly woke up, raised his hand like a schoolboy and asked permission to go to the toilet. The rank in charge of the search looked at him mockingly: "You can go home," he said. "What?" Brodsky asked in surprise. “Home,” the Chekist repeated and turned away. The ranks despised their civilian assistants, and Brodsky was probably placed with us so that when we heard a knock, we would not have time to destroy any manuscripts.

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam(maiden name - Khazina, October 30, 1899, Saratov - December 29, 1980, Moscow) - Russian writer, memoirist, linguist, teacher, wife of Osip Mandelstam.

Biography

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (née Khazina) was born on October 30, 1899 in Saratov into a wealthy Jewish family. Her father, Yakov Arkadyevich Khazin (? - February 8, 1930), the son of the Yampol merchant Khaim-Aron Khazin, a graduate of St. Petersburg University in law and mathematics, was a sworn attorney. Since the candidate of legal and mathematical sciences Ya. A. Khazin converted to Orthodoxy, and his bride Revekka Yakovlevna Rakhlina (in everyday life Vera Yakovlevna, 1863 - September 17, 1943, Tashkent) was recorded in the Jewish faith, their civil marriage was concluded in France. In 1897, their five-year-old son Alexander was baptized (December 31, 1892, Uman - 1920). Parents left Uman not earlier than the middle of 1897 and settled in Saratov, where his father received a position as a barrister of the Saratov Court of Justice. Nadezhda was the youngest child in a large family. In addition to her and their eldest son Alexander, the son Evgeny (1893-1974) and the eldest daughter Anna (1888-1938) grew up in the Khazin family. Mother graduated from the Higher Women's Medical Courses at the Medico-Surgical Academy in 1886 with a specialization in gynecology and worked as a doctor.

In 1902, the family moved to Kyiv, where on August 20 of the same year, his father was registered as a sworn attorney of the Kyiv Judicial Chamber. There, on August 14, 1909, N. Ya. Mandelstam entered the private women's gymnasium Adelaide Zhekulina on Bolshaya Podvalnaya, house 36. Most likely, the gymnasium was chosen by the parents as the closest educational institution to the place of residence of the family (Reitarskaya street, house 25). A feature of Zhekulina's gymnasium was the education of girls according to the program of men's gymnasiums. Having successfully passed the entrance examinations, Nadezhda, nevertheless, studied at the secondary level. She was rated "excellent" in history, "good" in physics and geography, and "satisfactory" in foreign languages ​​(Latin, German, French, English). In addition, as a child, Nadezhda visited several times with her parents the countries of Western Europe - Germany, France and Switzerland. After graduating from the gymnasium, Nadezhda entered the law faculty of St. Vladimir University in Kyiv, but dropped out of school. During the years of the revolution, she studied in the workshop of the famous artist A. A. Exter.

May 1, 1919 in the Kiev cafe "Kh. L. A. M "N. Ya. meets O. E. Mandelstam. The beginning of the novel of the famous poet with the young artist was recorded in his diary by the literary critic A. I. Deich:

"Comrade of dark days"

On May 16, 1934, Osip Mandelstam was arrested for writing and reading poetry and placed in the inner prison of the OGPU building on Lubyanka Square. On May 26, 1934, at a special meeting at the Collegium of the OGPU, Osip Mandelstam was sentenced to exile for three years in Cherdyn. Nadezhda Yakovlevna was summoned to a joint interrogation with her husband, at which she was asked to accompany her husband into exile. Shortly after arriving in Cherdyn, the original decision was reconsidered. As early as June 3, she informed the poet's relatives that Mandelstam in Cherdyn was "mentally ill, delirious." On June 5, 1934, N. I. Bukharin wrote a letter to I. V. Stalin, where he reported on the plight of the poet. As a result, on June 10, 1934, the case was reviewed and instead of exile, Osip Mandelstam was allowed to live in any city of the USSR he chose, except for 12 large cities (the list of prohibited ones included Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, etc.). The investigator, who called the spouses to inform them of this news, demanded that they choose a city with him without hesitation. Remembering that their friend lives in Voronezh, they decided to go there. In Voronezh, they met the poet S. B. Rudakov and the teacher of the Voronezh Aviation College N. E. Shtempel. With the latter, N. Ya. Mandelstam maintained friendly relations throughout her life. All these and subsequent events are described in detail in the book of Nadezhda Yakovlevna "Memoirs".

Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (maiden name Khazina, October 30, 1899, Saratov, Russian Empire - December 29, 1980, Moscow, USSR) - Russian writer, memoirist, linguist, teacher, wife of Osip Mandelstam.
N. Ya. Mandelstam (nee Khazina) was born on October 30, 1899 in Saratov into a wealthy family of baptized Jews. Her father, Yakov Arkadyevich Khazin (d. 1930), was a barrister, and her mother, Vera Yakovlevna Khazina, worked as a doctor. Hope was youngest child in a large family. In addition to her, two older brothers grew up in the Khazin family, Alexander (1891-1920) and Eugene (1893-1974) and sister Anna (d. 1938). At the beginning of the XX century. the family moved to Kyiv. There, on August 14, 1909, N. Ya. entered the private women's gymnasium Adelaida Zhekulina at 36 Bolshaya Podvalnaya. . A feature of Zhekulina's gymnasium was the education of girls according to the program of men's gymnasiums. Having successfully passed the entrance examinations, Nadezhda, nevertheless, studied at the secondary level. She had 5 points in history, "good" in physics and geography, and "satisfactory" in foreign languages ​​(Latin, German, French, English). In addition, as a child, Nadezhda visited several times with her parents the countries of Western Europe - Germany, France and Switzerland. After graduating from high school, Nadezhda entered the law faculty of St. Vladimir University in Kyiv, but dropped out of school. During the years of the revolution, she studied in the workshop of the famous artist A. A. Exter.
May 1, 1919 in the Kiev cafe "Kh. L.A.M "N. Ya. meets O. E. Mandelstam.

On May 26, 1934, at a special meeting at the Collegium of the OGPU, O. M. was sentenced to exile for three years in Cherdyn. On May 28, N. Ya. obtained permission to accompany her husband into exile. Shortly after arriving in Cherdyn, the original decision was reconsidered. As early as June 3, N. Ya. informed the poet's relatives that Mandelstam in Cherdyn was "mentally ill and delirious." On June 5, 1934, N. I. Bukharin wrote a letter to I. V. Stalin, where he reported on the plight of the poet. As a result, already on June 10, 1934, the case was reviewed and, instead of exile, O. Mandelstam was forbidden to live in 12 cities of the Soviet Union. The couple hastily left Cherdyn, deciding to settle in Voronezh. There, the Mandelstam couple met the poet S.B. Rudakov and teacher of the Voronezh Aviation College N.E. Stamp. With the last N.Ya. Mandelstam maintained relationships throughout her life.
After the second arrest, which took place on the night of May 1-2, 1938, the poet was exiled to a transit camp near Vladivostok, where he died of typhus.
After the death of her husband, Nadezhda Yakovlevna, fearing arrest, changed her place of residence several times. In addition, she devotes her life to preserving her husband's poetic legacy. Fearing searches and arrest along with O.M.'s manuscripts, she memorizes Mandelstam's poetry and prose.
After the start of the Great Patriotic War, N. Ya. Mandelstam and his mother were evacuated to Central Asia. At first they lived in the village of Muynak in Kara-Kalpakia, then they moved to a collective farm near the village of Mikhailovka, Dzhambul region. There, in the spring of 1942, they were discovered by E.Ya. Khazin. Already in the summer of 1942, N.Ya. Mandelstam with the assistance of A.A. Akhmatova moves to Tashkent. Presumably, this happened around July 3, 1942. In Tashkent, she passed the university exams externally. At first, Mandelstam taught foreign languages ​​at the Central House for the Artistic Education of Children. In May 1944, he began working at the Central Asian State University as a teacher in English.
In 1949, Mandelstam moved from Tashkent to Ulyanovsk. There she works as an English teacher at the local teacher's college. In February 1953, Mandelstam was fired from the institute as part of a campaign against cosmopolitanism. Since the dismissal almost coincided with the death of Stalin, serious consequences were avoided.
Thanks to the mediation of the influential Soviet writer A.A. Surkova, she received a teaching position at the Chita Pedagogical Institute, where she worked from September 1953 to August 1955.
From September 1955 to July 20, 1958, Mandelstam taught at the Cheboksary Pedagogical Institute, where she even headed the department. In 1956, she defended her Ph.D. thesis in English philology "Functions of the accusative case based on materials from Anglo-Saxon poetic monuments" under the guidance of V. M. Zhirmunsky.
In the summer of 1958, Mandelstam retired and moved to Tarusa, small town located 101 km from Moscow, which made it possible for former political prisoners to settle there. This made Tarusa a popular place for the dissident intelligentsia. The informal leader among the local intelligentsia was K.G. Paustovsky, who, having connections in Moscow, was able to draw the attention of the authorities to the problems of a provincial town. In Tarusa, N.Ya. Mandelstam began to write her "Memoirs". In 1961, taking advantage of the concessions from above, the collection "Tarus Pages" was published in Kaluga, where N.Ya. Mandelstam published under the pseudonym "Yakovleva".
In 1962, dissatisfied with her modest pension, she got a job as a teacher at the Faculty of Foreign Languages ​​at the Pskov State Pedagogical Institute, working there until 1964.

In November 1965, N. Ya. managed to move into her own Moscow one-room apartment on Bolshaya Cheryomushkinskaya Street, where she lived until the end of her life. In her small apartment, she arranged something like a social and literary salon, which was regularly visited by the capital's intelligentsia (Yu. Freidin, A. Sinyavsky, S. Averintsev, B. Messerer, B. Akhmadulina, etc.), as well as Western Slavists ( C. Brown, J. Malmstad, P. Troupin and others), who were interested in Russian literature and O.E. Mandelstam.
In the 1960s, Nadezhda Yakovlevna wrote the book Memories (first book edition: New York, Chekhov Publishing House, 1970).
In the early 70s, a new volume of N. Ya.'s memoirs, The Second Book, was published (Paris: YMCA-PRESS, 1972), which caused a mixed reaction. Shortly before Mandelstam's death, Book Three was published abroad (Paris: YMCA-PRESS, 1978).
For many years she was a close friend of Anna Akhmatova, wrote a memoir book about her (first full publication - 2007).

Throughout the 1970s. Mandelstam's health was steadily deteriorating. She rarely left the house, spent a lot of time in bed. However, until the end of the decade, Mandelstam was able to receive friends and relatives at home.
In 1979, heart problems worsened. Her activity began to decline, only the closest people helped. In early December 1980, at the age of 81, Mandelstam was prescribed strict bed rest, it was forbidden to get out of bed. On the initiative of one of the closest people, Yu. L. Freidin, round-the-clock duty was arranged. The people closest to her were entrusted with duty near the dying Mandelstam.
On the night of December 29, 1980, while Vera Lashkova was on duty, Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam died. Mandelstam was buried according to the Orthodox rite, farewell to the body took place on January 1, 1981 in the Church of the Sign Mother of God. She was buried on January 2, 1981 at the Staro-Kuntsevsky (Troekurovsky) cemetery.
Taken from wikipedia

Notes

To s. 4. Shortly before his arrest, in April 1934, Mandelstam went to Leningrad, where the incident with A. N. Tolstoy mentioned at the beginning of the book happened. The reason for it was Tolstoy's behavior during the public trial, which took place on September 13, 1932, in the case of Mandelstam with S.P. Borodin, then a poet, speaking under the pseudonym Amir Sargidzhan. The court, presided over by Tolstoy, issued an ambiguous decision condemning both sides (the case, in particular, was about the beatings inflicted on N. Ya. Mandelstam). "... Sargidzhan was nominated by the writers' organization - both at the trial and in the verdict of the public and trade union court - as the executor of a special writer's, like official, justice," Mandelstam wrote to the Moscow City Committee of Writers, announcing his withdrawal from the organization, "which allowed such an unprecedented disgrace ". Against the literary and social background of those years, Tolstoy's interview ("About Myself"), which appeared in print on the occasion of his 50th birthday, was symptomatic: so that "in new era to become a new writer,” the task was posed there using one’s own example, “it is required “to move from the world of humanitarian ideas to the world of ideas of dialectical materialism ... and not everyone has yet been freed from the children's glasses of a humanitarian worldview. Epigonian humanism will smolder as long as the “gray landowner” still lives with us ”(Lit. Gaz. 1933. Jan. 29). Regarding the incident itself, we know the letter-address sent to Tolstoy on April 27, 1934 by the Presidium of the Leningrad Organizing Committee of the SSP In this letter, Mandelstam's act is assessed as "a hysterical escapade of a man in whom the traditions of the worst part of the pre-revolutionary literary environment are still alive" (IMLI, f. A. N. Tolstoy).

The arrest of Mandelstam on the night of May 13-14, 1934, takes place in his apartment in the writers' cooperative house No. 5 on Furmanova Street (former Nashekinsky Lane, the house was demolished in 1978). Of the persons mentioned in the book, M. A. Bulgakov, S. A. Klychkov, S. I. Kirsanov, the writer-humorist V. B. Ardov and his wife N. A. Olshevskaya lived there. The Mandelstams moved to the newly built house in August 1933.

This is how poetry came about...- The lines of A. Akhmatova from the poem “I know I can’t budge…” (1939) are quoted.

Leva- son of A. Akhmatova Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov.

“The plot is a great thing!…”- This is how V. Khlebnikov's poem of 1922 begins.

... drafts of Petrarch's sonnets.- This refers to the four sonnets translated by Mandelstam; “Wolf” is the conditional name of the poem “For the explosive valor of the coming centuries ...” (see No. 2 in the section “Poems by O. Mandelstam”).

"What is this about?" - the rank asked in bewilderment ...- Comic poems about the house manager (beginning of 1934) end like this:

…The instrument roared.

The crowd of residents is offended.

They send for the manager.

He is filled with anger.

And immediately the janitor Sebastian called by him

Bang-bang - The car was crushed,

I gave the scammer in the mouth.

It's not that Sebastian is a brute,

But the bad thing is that bang is kind of rough.

... instead of camps, he arranged real sanatoriums ... - The fact that "the prison regime ... is more like forced rest homes than prisons" was a special resolution of the Central Committee of the party, issued on the report of N. Yezhov at the February-March Plenum of 1937 (see: October. 1988. No. 10 pp. 9).

The prophetic verses had already been written by this time...- Of course, verses foreshadowing the poet's own death. For Gumilyov, this is "Worker", for Mandelstam - "On the sledges laid with straw ..." The poems were written at the same time - in March 1916.

... "with a crowd and a herd."- The death formula from Mandelstam's "Poems about the Unknown Soldier" (1937):

The aorta bleeds

And whispers through the rows:

I was born in ninety-four

I was born in ninety-two...

And in a fist clutching a frayed

Year of birth - with a crowd and a herd,

I whisper with a bloodless mouth...

…of the manuscript they were interested in…- Manuscripts of a poem about Stalin (“We live without smelling the country under us ...” - see No. 9).

... I visited Bukharin ...- In the Izvestia building on Strastnaya Square, where N. I. Bukharin worked from the end of February 1934.

... a principled supporter of revolutionary terror ...- The conviction that terror is justified by a revolutionary-transforming idea, the recognition of the need for "cruelty towards enemies" in the spirit of the "wonderful traditions of the Cheka" under Dzerzhinsky - N. I. Bukharin conveyed to his last letter "To the Future Generation of Party Leaders" (see: Gorelov I Nikolai Bukharin, Moscow, 1988, p. 168).

Political Red Cross- The Committee for Assistance to Political Exiles and Prisoners, which existed on voluntary donations from the 80s. last century. After the revolution, it resumed in Petrograd in December 1917; in Moscow, the Committee worked from February 1918 to mid-1937 under the permanent chairmanship of E. P. Peshkova. At the XV Party Congress in 1927, the Red Cross was spoken of as a "party" adjoining the opposition, about its workers - that "they went down to attracting liberal sympathetic people, they turned to the liberals" (Em. Yaroslavsky's speech). The Committee was located on the Kuznetsk bridge in the house number 24.

... "do not touch, do not kill" ...- From Mandelstam's poem "January 1, 1924" - a formula related, according to the inner plot of the poem, to the end of the revolutionary time:

Pharmacy raspberries blaze in the snow,

And somewhere underwood clicked.

The driver's back and half an arshin of snow:

What else do you want? Not touched, not killed.

... at the congress of journalists in those days Baltrushaitis rushed about ... Where this happened is not clear. In May - June 1934, meetings were held on various genres of literature - the First All-Union Congress of Writers was being prepared.

... in connection with the transition to "simplified interrogation".- Back on December 1, 1934 (on the day of Kirov's assassination), Stalin dictated the decision of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee on the accelerated, simplified and final consideration of cases accused of terror. In 1937 (November 14), the publication of an emergency law introduced a "simplified procedure for legal proceedings" on certain points of Article 58 of the Criminal Code (sabotage, terrorism, sabotage). These laws eliminated publicity judicial trial, the participation of the parties in it, appeals and petitions for pardon were prohibited. "... The use of physical force in the practice of the NKVD was allowed since 1937 with the permission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks" (Stalin's telegram read out at the XX Party Congress). On July 29, 1936, “a secret instruction was adopted on the admissibility of any methods of investigation against spies, counter-revolutionaries, White Guards, Trotskyists and Zinovievites” (Gorelov I. Nikolai Bukharin. M., 1988. P. 166).

“There behind the barbed wire…”- Quoted (inaccurately) lines from the epilogue of A. Akhmatova's "Poem without a Hero":

And behind the barbed wire

In the heart of the dense taiga -

I don't know what year

Became a handful of camp dust,

Became a fairy tale from a terrible one

My doppelgänger is coming for interrogation...

... the investigator had a patronymic traditional in Russian literature ...- Patronymic Khristoforovich wore gr. A. X. Benkendorf, chief of the gendarmes in Pushkin's time and head of the Third Department of the Imperial Chancellery, which was in charge of political investigation. The full name of the investigator in question is Nikolai Khristoforovich Shivarov. The cases of N. Klyuev, V. Kirillov and other poets and writers passed through the investigative department headed by him (reported by I. S. Postupalsky). At the end of the 30s. was repressed and committed suicide in the camp in the early 1940s.

Quoted from memory, Dante Talk, p. 41.- Hereinafter, notes by N. Ya. Mandelstam 1977

... to the camp for the construction of the canal ...- To the Moscow-Volga Canal, which began construction immediately after the completion of the White Sea-Baltic Canal in 1933.

“What to be afraid of,” said Stalin, “we must work ...”- Probably a paraphrase of the words of Stalin, said in. In a conversation with the German writer Emil Ludwig in December 1931, Stalin then stated that it would be impossible to hold power with the “policy of intimidation” alone, that “a small part of the population” has a fear of Soviet power, but the matter is not limited to intimidation here - “we are going ... to the liquidation of this bourgeois stratum."

…reading the title of his article…- "The moral experience of the era." The article appeared in 1960 in Literaturnaya Gazeta (August 14). In 1962, the issue of the activities of J. Elsberg, whose slanderous denunciations appeared in the court cases of I. Babel, M. Levidov, S. Makashin, L. Pinsky, E. Steinberg and others, was considered at a meeting of the presidium of the Moscow Writers' Organization - Elsberg was expelled from the Writers' Union, but at a meeting in the Writers' Union of the RSFSR, after his statement that he "served the Soviet people" and should not be responsible for everyone alone, he was reinstated (given in the collection: Pamyat. Paris. No. 5. P. 123 ).

... with linguists on the "case of dictionaries".- Arrested in March 1935 in this case, prof. G. G. Shlet wrote: “First of all, the investigation charged me with taking part in editing the German-Russian dictionary, the first volume of which was published under the editorship of persons sympathetic to Nazi Germany; at the same time, the investigation accused me of having links with people who professed Russian (Great Russian) nationalism” (see Vopr. Philosophy, 1988, No. 11, p. 75). Among the repressed were professors M. A. Petrovsky and B. I. Yarkho. D. S. Usov published before his arrest, in collaboration with teachers of German origin, “Collection of texts for translations from German language» (1934).

Zhirmunsky. - note 1977

I was escorted to the station...- Departure for exile takes place on the same day as N. Ya. Mandelstam's summons to the investigator. The poet's archive preserved a certificate with the date May 28, 1934, "given by c. Mandelstam N. Ya. that she follows in the mountains. Cherdyn to the place of exile of her husband - Mandelstam (a) O. E. He cannot serve as a residence permit and is subject to surrender to the Cherdyn regional department of the OGPU.

Lyuba Ehrenburg. - note 1977

Balakhana (Turkm.)- light superstructure over the first floor of the building.

those whom they dubbed "camp dust" ... - The author of this expression, which has become official, was Beria.

"The Last Day of the Condemned"- the story of V. Hugo.

. "The tribe of Pushkin scholars", etc.- From Mandelstam's poem "The day was about five heads ..." (No. 13), which, refracted by hallucinations, reflected the impressions of the journey to exile - from Moscow to Sverdlovsk, from Sverdlovsk by narrow-gauge railway to Solikamsk.

The first transfer was in Sverdlovsk.- The date of transplantation is indicated by a litter under a comic fable composed on that day by Mandelstam:

One tailor

With a good head

He was sentenced to the highest measure.

So what? - tailor following the manner,

He took measurements from himself

And still alive.

(See: Gershtein E. G. New about Mandelstam. Paris, 1986. P. 189).

The story of Georgy Ivanov that O. M. tried to commit suicide in Warsaw in his early youth, in my opinion, has not the slightest foundation, like many other short stories of this memoirist. - note 1977

"Suicide"- a play by N. R. Erdman (1928). See her analysis below.

... to take from the station to the pier.- And then by boat along the Kama, Vishera and Cholva to Cherdyn - the path reflected in Mandelstam's poem "Kama" (No. 11).

We were brought to Cheka...- The Mandelstams arrived in Cherdyn on June 3. A certificate “in exchange for a residence permit” was preserved that day, “to the exiled administrator O.E. Obliged to appear for registration at the regional department of the OGPU every 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th."

S.-r. - note 1977

Gendelman. - note 1977

Vekhovtsy- participants in the collection of articles about the Russian intelligentsia "Milestones" (1909) - N. A. Berdyaev, S. N. Bulgakov, M. O. Gershenzon, A. S. Izgoev, B. A. Kistyakovsky, P. B. Struve, S. L. Frank.

"Corinthian brideA"- Goethe's ballad translated by A. K. Tolstoy.

... Khodasevich ... called -"secret hearing".- In the poem "Psyche! My poor…” (collection “Heavy Lyre”):

... A simple soul is unbearable

The gift of secret hearing is heavy.

Psyche falls under him.

... during the seizure of valuables.- The decision of the Council of People's Commissars "On the seizure of precious metals, money and various valuables" from individuals and societies dates back to July 25, 1920. The text by N. Ya. Mandelstam refers to the time of the so-called gold campaign, which was carried out in 1930-1931.

Actor of the Chamber Theater - Shura Rumnev. - note 1977

Shengeli. - note 1977

Narbut. - note 1977

Petrovs. - note 1977

And that's what we thought- who already knew from the trials of the twenties, what can be expected from Vyshinsky! ... - While still the rector of the 1st Moscow State University, Vyshinsky headed in 1928 the Special Presence of the Supreme Court in the Shakhty case of "saboteurs" (under the chief prosecutor N. Krylenko), in that In the same role as the chief judge, he participated in the trial of the “Industrial Party” case in 1930. The cases were falsified, the defendants' arrogance was forced by provocations and torture. The last of this series of "show" trials and the most deadly in terms of the methods of investigation was the trial of the "Union Bureau of the Mensheviks" in March 1931 - the time of the creation of Mandelstam's "wolf cycle" (No. 1 - 6).

Where did Tarasenkov get the text "Apartments"? Maybe there too. - note 1977

…ABOUT. M. had to write down the poems, and the investigator put the autograph in a folder. - This autograph, equal in value to a national relic, was recently found in the KGB archive. It was presented to R. Rozhdestvensky, Chairman of the Mandelstam's Literary Heritage Commission, accepted by him "with gratitude" and transferred to the TsGALI archive (see: Moskovskie Novosti, 1989, April 9, with autograph reproduction). The real place of its storage could be the upcoming Museum of the Memorial Society. His widow and executor expressed her will regarding the preservation of Mandelstam's inheritance in her "Testament" (see p. 471).

Leva Bruni. - note 1977

Lulu Ahrens. - note 1977

Shengeli. - note 1977

Margulis. - note 1977

...someone D[ligach] printed poems in one of the thick magazines...- New world. 1935. No. 2. L. Dligach's poem "Speech about the Village" (reprinted in his collection: The Sixth Sense. M., 1936). In it, in particular:

I walked through all the snow in my life,

I see: in millions of hectares

Lined country.

I recognize the enemy in a song:

Its last string is still tight.

Wed with the last stanza of Mandelstam's "Stans" (No. 12).

... in Kyiv in the mid-20s ...- Two essays by Mandelstam ("Sukharevka" and "Berezil") were published in the newspaper "Kiev Proletarian" (ed. A. D. Zilberberg) in May 1926. Even earlier, on January 13, 1924, in the Kiev newspaper "Red Army ”, where L. Dligach worked, Mandelstam’s review “Above the Red Army Manuscripts” appeared.

... in the editorial office of Moskovsky Komsomolets ...- In this newspaper - from the autumn of 1929 to the beginning of 1930 - Mandelstam led a "literary page" and worked with poetic youth.

Erdman. - note 1977

Another writer- A. Yashin (story "Levers". - Lit. Moscow. Issue 2. 1956).

Tyshler. - note 1977

The official telegram arrived the next day.- Probably, on June 14, on the day of the last registration of Mandelstam (mark on the certificate of the Cherdyn ROOGPU). The Mandelstams left Cherdyn on June 16, making their way back by steamboat through Perm to Kazan, and from there by train to Voronezh via Moscow.

... the nobles were leaving Leningrad.- The mass expulsion from Leningrad of nobles with their families took place in the winter - in the spring of 1935. Its basis was a closed letter from the Central Committee dated January 18 to all party organizations - “Lessons from the events associated with the villainous murder of comrade. Kirov" (see: News of the Central Committee of the CPSU. 1989. No. 9 8). At the same time, the first wave of mass arrests swept across the country, but in Leningrad in particular, which gave rise to the “Kirov flow” of camp inmates.

Chaadaev. - note 1977

A passport is a privilege of a city dweller...- According to the law of December 27, 1932 “On a Unified Passport System”, compulsory registration throughout the USSR was introduced with the aim of “better accounting of the population of cities, workers' settlements and new buildings ... as well as in order to clear these populated areas from hiding kulak, criminal and other antisocial elements." Rural residents were not issued passports.

…shortly before the introduction of cards…- The rationing system, covering workers and employees, was introduced as early as November 1928 - first for bread, and by the end of 1929 for almost all food products, then for industrial products. The village remained self-sustaining.

... to the window of the MGB ...- The functions of the Ministry of State Security were then performed by the United State Political Directorate (OGPU, first GPU), which replaced the Cheka, which was disbanded in February 1922.

. We read about the execution of Blumkin (or Konrad?) in Armenia...- It is not clear which of the executed people we are talking about. The resolution of the Collegium of the OGPU on the execution of Blumkin dates back to November 3, 1929. Konrad - probably F. M. Konar, Deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture, a former acquaintance of Mandelstam. Pravda reported on his execution among 35 employees of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture on March 12, 1933. In 1930, Pravda (September 25) reported on the execution of 48 senior officials Food Industry("organizers of food hunger"), headed by prof. A. V. Ryazantsev.

95 The Mandelstams met Boris Sergeevich Kuzin in Ernvani, where they arrived in early May 1930.

... with the state, then still "too new" ...- Mandelstam's quatrain is implied, apparently serving as a variant to the poem "Oh, this air, confusedly drunk ..." (1916):

About the state too early

The earth is still sad -

We'll be in the black line

On the black square of the Kremlin.

It was in Kyiv in the nineteenth year.- In April 1919, J. Blyumkish, who had previously been hiding under different surnames, voluntarily appeared in the Kyiv Cheka and, by a decree of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of May 6, was amnestied. Around this time, the described episode takes place. Blumkin's next attack on Mandelstam was in Moscow in October 1920, which I. G. Ehrenburg will mention in the book "People, Years, Life" (book II, ch. 16).

. 96 ... the man who "shot the imperial ambassador" ...- From a poem by I. Gumilyov "My readers" (1921).

... he came with government trains ...- In March 1918, when the government moved from Petrograd to Moscow

. The scene of action is the Moscow Cafe of Poets ...- Probably, the cafe "Tenth Muse" in the house on the corner of Kamergersky Lane. and Tverskoy (The cafe of poets was closed by that time). The “skirmish” between Mandelstam and Blumkin takes place a few days before July 6, 1918, when the German ambassador V. Mirbach was killed. The story of Georgy Ivanov is in his book "Petersburg Winters" (Paris, 1928). Saying that the Cheka had just been organized, N. Ya. Mandelstam is mistaken: the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (VChK) was formed on December 7, 1917, and at the time described, along with the action of the tribunals, it already possessed the powers to extrajudicial executions and other forms of terror.

... Dzerzhinsky in a report on the murder of Mirbach ...- In his testimony in this case, Dzerzhinsky wrote: “Blyumkin was admitted to the commission on the recommendation of the Central Committee of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. to organize in the Counter-revolutionary department of counterintelligence on espionage. A few days, maybe a week before the assassination attempt, I received from Raskolnikov and Mandelstam ... information that this type in conversations allows himself to say such things: the life of people is in my hands, I will sign a piece of paper - in two hours there will be no human life. Here I have gr. Puslovsky, a poet, of great cultural value, I will sign his death warrant, but if the interlocutor needs this life, he will leave it, etc. When Mandelstam, indignant, protested, Blumkin began to threaten him that if he told anyone about him, he will take revenge with all his might. On the same day, at a meeting of the Commission, it was decided, at my suggestion, to dissolve our counterintelligence and leave Blumkin without a position for the time being ”(From the history of the Cheka: Collection of documents. M., 1958. P. 154).

... Mayakovsky ditties ...- There are no such works in the collected works of V. Mayakovsky. A picture close to their content in his "Ode to the Revolution" (1918).

... Pasternak ... refused to give his signature ...- Under a letter approving the execution of M. Tukhachevsky, I. Yakir and other military leaders. “When five years ago,” B. Pasternak wrote to K. I. Chukovsky in 1942, “I refused Stavsky to sign under meanness and was ready to die for it, but he gave me this i roses and still gave my signature fraudulently and beside me, he shouted: “When will this Tolstoyan foolishness end?”

…after her return from Afghanistan.- Since the spring of 1921 t, about March 1923 L. Reisner was a member of the Plenipotentiary Mission of the USSR in Afghanistan, headed by F. Raskolnikov.

102. Berdyaev… thinks that the intelligentsia was destroyed by the people…- For N. A. Berdyaev, it was a tragedy that the “elementary ideas” of the Russian intelligentsia itself triumphed in the revolution, otherwise, nihilism, which spread to the popular stratum, as responding to the vengeful rancor of the “man from the people”. The revolution, according to Berdyaev, began with the destruction of the cultural renaissance, the "creators of culture" (see his book: Self-knowledge. Paris, 1949, p. 178).

Gorky... got busy.- The petition of M. Gorky is available in the case file on Gumilyov's charges (see: Novy Mir. 1987. No. 12. P. 258. Testimony of G. A. Terekhov).

... it was necessary to arrest some military, it seems, admirals ...- Apparently, we are talking about the circumstances of the arrest and subsequent execution of Captain 1st Rank A. M. Shchastny (a similar story about the role of L. Reisner in his arrest is given by G. Ivanov in "Petersburg Winters"). Shchastny, appointed at the end of March 1918 as head of the naval forces Baltic Fleet(in place of the arrested and also later deceased Admiral A.V. Razvozov), before the German invasion of Finland (the situation after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), he led the fleet from Helsingfors to Kronstadt, but prevented its explosion, about which there was a secret telegram from L. Trotsky. Summoned to Moscow, he was the last to be arrested on May 26, 1918 at a meeting of the Naval Board, apparently with the participation of F. Raskolnikov (Trotsky's deputy for maritime affairs) and L. Reisner, then Commissar of the Naval general staff. Compare: “We shot Shchastny.” “We,” she said firmly and somewhat defiantly. So spoke at that time a few revolutionary intellectuals ”(in the memoirs of L. Nikulin about Reisner: Notes of a Sputnik. M., 1932. S. II). Shchastny, accused of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, was tried by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, and the indictment in his case appeared in the newspapers on the same day - June 16 - with the decision of the People's Commissar of Justice P. Stuchka, freeing the tribunal "in choosing measures to combat the counter-revolution" from any restrictions (“with the exception of those cases when the law defines the measure in the expressions: “not less than””).

Once he bombarded O. M. with telegrams ...- Probably, the episode refers to the beginning of 1925, when A. Veronsky first announced his departure from Krasnaya Nov, not wanting to work with Raskolnikov. Previously, Mandelstam negotiated with Voronsky about the publication of his autobiographical prose The Noise of Time (in April 1925 it was published by the Vremya cooperative publishing house, where G.P. Blok was the editor-in-chief). Veronsky was finally forced to leave Krasnaya Nov in 1927, and then this caused the aforementioned boycott of "fellow travelers".

... publishing a ridiculous magazine ...- A bi-weekly magazine "Rudin", aimed at propaganda against the war and the government. Published by the Reisner family in 1915-1916. (8 numbers came out).

... wrote to Stalin.- From the letter of N. I. Bukharin to Stalin, the phrase became known: “Poets are always right, history is for them” (see: Gershtein E. G. New about Mandelstam. Paris, 1986. P. 88).

... was at the very center of the world communist movement ...- From December 1926, when Bukharin became general secretary of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, until the April Plenum of the Central Committee of 1929. The Gray House is obviously the house of the Comintern on Vozdvizhenka (then renamed Komintern Street), opposite the Manezh building.

... found out on the street about the alleged execution of five old people ...- This whole episode with the worries about the condemned and the involvement of N. I. Bukharin in their rescue dates back to May 1928. In the same month, the book “Poems” by Mandelstam, the last during his lifetime, was published.

To s. 107 ... "wonderful oath to the fourth estate" ... -

Am I betraying the shameful slander -

Frost smells like an apple again -

Oath wonderful to the fourth estate

And vows big to tears?

So in Mandelstam's poem "January 1, 1924". In the last line there is an echo of the oath taken by the young Herzen and Ogarev on Sparrow Hills (“The Past and Thoughts”, Chapter IV).

... Herzen's doctrine of "prioralusdignitatis"...- The expression of Augustine of the Blessed ("primacy of dignity") - in the sense of the advantage that a qualitative account has in history over a quantitative one (including an account not in time, but in essence) - Herzen puts it from the mouth of one character in the book "From the Other Shore", but the general The meaning of this formula does not correspond to the content of the book, and Herzen does not seem to have words like those given below.

. ZIF- the publishing house "Land and Factory", with which in 1929 Mandelstam had a major legal conflict (see note to p. 166). In reflection of it, as well as the earlier story with the worries about the five convicts, Mandelstam wrote the "Fourth Prose".

... "I'm ready to die."- This phrase, according to the memoirs of A. Akhmatova, Mandelstam said to her even before the first arrest, in February 1934 (see: Vopr. Lit. 1989. No. 2. P. 203). The phrase was included in her “Poem without a Hero” (Part I, Ch. 1):

"I'm ready to die."

... In 1922, O. M. worked for his arrested brother ... It was then that he turned to Bukharin for the first time.- It was at the beginning of 1923, probably immediately after the Plenum of the Central Committee on February 25-22 (its decisions were not published). In a letter to his father, Mandelstam described his first visit to N. I. Bukharin as follows: “He was very attentive and today he is talking on the phone with Zinoviev about Zhenya. He promised to do his best and suggested that I keep in touch with him systematically. He said among other things: “I cannot give guarantees… The other day the Central Committee forbade its members to do this. There is only a detour." Then he said: “Take him on bail you (that is, me?), You are a famous person (?)”. Tomorrow I will find out from Bukharin how Zinoviev reacted to his request and what kind of "auspicii": prospects for the future (Bukharin's expression).

Mandelstam's brother Evgeny lived and was arrested in Petrograd, which explains Bukharin's intention to telephone G. Zinoviev there. Apparently, the conversation with the latter did not lead to success, and the next day, as described by N. Ya. Mandelstam, Bukharin turned to F. Dzerzhinsky. The position of Mandelstam himself, his literary and social status had changed by this time. It was the beginning of 1923 that N. Ya. Mandelstam dated - linking this with "some kind of decree" - the removal of his name "from the lists of employees of all official publications" ("Biographical note", manuscript). At the same time, the political label “internal emigrant” arose.

They didn't come out. - note 1977

... Goethe's broom, which carried water on the orders of the sorcerer's apprentice.- In Goethe's ballad "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", he calls the spirits to bring water, but without the "old sorcerer" he does not know how to stop them.

... he arranged ... retirement ...- Personal life pension in the amount of 200 rubles. was appointed to Mandelstam in March 1932. The surviving pension book indicates that the appointment took place on the basis of the decrees of the Council of People's Commissars on pensions of May 30, 1928 and August 3, 1930.

...twice he was arrested...- In Feodosia by the Wrangel counterintelligence (August 1920) and in Batumi by the Menshevik military authorities (September). In October 1920, after a year and a half of wanderings through the South, engulfed in civil war, Mandelstam returned to Petrograd. M. Gorky was in charge of the Commission for the Improvement of the Life of Scientists (KUBU) organized by him in Petrograd.

... Yakhontov came to Voronezh on tour ...- The arrival of the artist, who performed with the programs "Petersburg" and "Pushkin", was reported by the Voronezh newspaper "Commune" on March 24, 1935.

For thirty-two years, not a single line of his poems appeared in print ...- Since 1932, when three poems by Mandelstam were published in Literaturnaya Gazeta (November 23).

…the right to “breathe and open doors”…- From the poem "If our enemies took me ..." (No. 43). Regarding his last lines, N. Ya. Mandelstam wrote: “Oh. M. said that in this poem the exact wording of the “prison feeling” ... In this poem there is an element of “an oath to the fourth estate” and the belief that our land has nevertheless escaped decay. The last two lines came to him unexpectedly and almost frightened him: “Why did this pop up again?” The question arose of how to write it down. I suggested a dummy last line: "will wake up" and instead of the union "a" the union "and" ... "

In a word, not only cities were conquered ...- In N. Gumilyov's poem "The Word": "... The sun was stopped by the word, the cities were destroyed by the Word."

When O. M. decided to make the first installment ...- In January 1937, writing an ode to Stalin.

He was sentenced by decree to five years.- Obviously, according to the well-known resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of August 7, 1932 "On strengthening public property." An attempt on her life was equated with the actions of "enemies of the people", and as a judicial repression, regardless of the measure appropriated, the death penalty was provided. In its extreme form, the "law on five spikelets" was actively operating in 1932-1933.

"Kannifershtand", more correctly "kannitfershtan", Lit.: I can't understand you. An expression coming from a story with the same name I.-P. Goebel, translated in verse by V. A. Zhukovsky (the poem “There were two and one more”). In the story, this is how the Dutch answer the question of one German, to whom these and other riches belong. The simple-minded German mistook the answer for the name of the owner.

... crowds hanging in clusters on the platforms of the cars ...- The city ditty of the 30s is known:

My white body hurts

Abrasion all over the back.

I was on the tram

Like a grape.

Probably, this ditty influenced Mandelstam's line about "a tram cherry of a terrible time" (see No. 4).

...we were called to the reception of the Moscow State University...- Now the NKVD. On July 10, 1934, the OGPU (see note to p. 93) became part of the reorganized People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, calling itself the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGV). At the same time, following the model of the existing collegiums, special meetings, and since 1929 the “troikas” of the Cheka - GPU, a body was created outside of judicial reprisal in the form of a Special Meeting (SSO) of three persons organized under the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. Cases in the SSO were considered in absentia GG Yagoda became the people's commissar.

When O. M. left for Tambov to a sanatorium ...- Mandelstam stayed there from December 21, 1935 to January 5, 1936

The last room in ... the house of the theatrical dressmaker ...- The Mandelstams settled in it in the autumn of 1936.

I hastily translated some ... novel ...- Marguerite W. Babylon. Per. N. Khazina. Goslitizdat, 1935. The second contract is for O Faolein's book The Nest of Ordinary People. In 1941, it was published in N. Averyanova's translation.

. "The Eve"- Smenovekhovskaya newspaper (1922 - 1924), published in Berlin with a separate office in Moscow. Mandelstam's poems and articles were published in the weekly "Literary Supplements" to the newspaper (in 1924, there were also only translations).

"Balls" (1926) and "Tram" ("Two Trams", 1925)- Books of Mandelstam's poems for children, published in the Leningrad branch of the State Historical Institute, where S. Ya. Marshak was the editor of children's literature.

... the struggle for the "purity of the line", which opened with Stalin's article in Bolshevik ... - It's about about Stalin's letter to the editors of the Proletarian Revolution magazine, published in issue 6 of this magazine for 1931 (came out in November). A letter titled “On Some Questions in the History of Bolshevism,” which declared Trotskyism “the vanguard of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie,” spoke of attempts to “smuggle it into literature,” etc., opened a broad ideological campaign to revise the published literature. In Bolshevik the following year (No. 4, 1932), Stalin's old note, Letter from the Caucasus (1910), was reprinted against the then Menshevik "liquidators." It served as a similar signal along the "Menshevik line."

ZKP- the newspaper "For Communist Education", in which N. Ya. Mandelstam worked in the fall of 1931 and after a break in 1932.

Mandelstam's prose "Journey to Armenia" "broke" into print in 1933 (Star. No. 5).

... "howl under the Kremlin walls."- From a poem by A. Akhmatova “They took you away at dawn ...”, marked: “1935. Moscow (Kutafya). The Kutafya Tower at the Trinity Gates of the Kremlin is the place where, at the end of October 1935, Akhmatova handed over a letter to Stalin, after her husband (N. N. Punin) and son were arrested for the first time.

... I went to Moscow and talked ... with the leaders of the Union ...- In December 1935 - January 1936, when Mandelstam was in Tambov.

"About a partisan?" - he asked…- A. S. Shcherbakov imagined in the name of the Kama River, about which Mandelstam’s poem was written, the name of the famous Bolshevik underground worker Kamo (S. A. Ter-Petrosyan), the main actor in carrying out a loud Tiflis expropriation (June 1907) with murders and the seizure of treasury sums.

... Akhmatov's crystals ...- In the poem "Voronezh", dedicated to Mandelstam: "... I pass through the crystals timidly, The run of the patterned sledge is so wrong." In February 1936, A. Akhmatova visited the Mandelstams in Voronezh.

... every longing is longing for eternity.- N. A. Berdyaev speaks about this in the book “Self-Knowledge” (Paris, 1949, p. 54).

…we heard the radio informing us of upcoming trials…- August 15, 1936, when they announced the end of the investigation into the case of the "Trotskyist-Zinoviev bloc."

The conversation took place at the end of June ...- Probably June 13 (1934). On this day in Cherdyn a telegram was received from Moscow from E. Ya. Khazin: "Replacement confirmed."

... Lominadze, recalled for execution from Tiflis ...- In November 1930, the first secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee of the Party, V.V. Lominadze, who dared to reproach the party "for the lordly-feudal attitude towards the needs and interests of workers and peasants" (Pravda. 1930. 2 December), was ranked among the "left- right bloc Syrtsov - Lominadze "and removed from all posts. Later transferred by the secretary of the city committee to the Urals, in January 1935 he shot himself.

... "rhyme is not the repetition of lines ..."- From B. Pasternak's poem "My beauty, all become ..." (1931). Mandelstam's poem "Night in the yard, master's lies ..." - see No. 3.

Fadeev was then the editor of Krasnaya Nov...- In 1931 - The magazine printed at that time B. Pasternak's poems from the book "Second Birth".

... "positive" verses ...- The cycle “Glory to the World”, published in three issues of the Ogonyok magazine for 1950. The son of A. Akhmatova L. N. Gumilyov, arrested in March 1938, went to the front from exile after the camp, was again in 1949 arrested. N. N. Punin was arrested at the same time and died three years later.

... "the people, as a judge, judges" ...- See No. 43; “You rise in deaf years ...” - From a poem by Mandelstam in 1918 “Let us glorify, brothers, the twilight of freedom ...”

... Commissar Linde, who was killed by soldiers at the front.- F.F. Linde, Commissar of the Kerensky government in the Special Army on the Southwestern Front, died while agitating for the conduct of the war, in August 1917.

…knew Linde, probably from Sinani's house.- About the populist family of B. N. Sinani Mandelstam wrote a separate chapter in his autobiographical prose “The Noise of Time”. A role in the early biography of Mandelstam was played by the well-known in near-revolutionary circles "boarding house Linde" near the Mustamyaki station of the Finnish Railway. (see Linde's obituary: Past. Book 24. 1924, and also: Daugava. Riga. 1988. No. 2. P. 106 - 107).

“Blessing you will descend into deep hell…”- From Mandelstam's poem "When a temporary worker prepared for us in October ...", written in November 1917.

In an article about Hamlet...- This refers to the section of the article "Remarks on translations from Shakespeare", where B. Pasternak speaks of Hamlet as a "prince of the blood", not for a moment forgetting his rights to the throne.

. ... Gorky circle.- This refers to broad social strata, which included employees and readers of revolutionary-democratic and Bolshevik magazines ("Sovremennik", "Chronicle", etc.).

... extolled "neoacmeism" with its head O. M ...- In a review of Mandelstam's "Second Book" (Print and Revolution. 1923. No. 6), V. Bryusov, negatively evaluating the book, wrote about its author as a poet "very famous" in the circles of "neo-Acmeists", for whom his poems after " Stone "" an indisputable example ".

anti-anthroposophic and anti-theosophical orientation O. M ...- Anthroposophical and theosophical views, which were widely spread among the intellectual elite at the turn of the "new century", were alien to Mandelstam's existential (personal-historical) approach to philosophical matters, his views on the historical process based on the prototypical role of New Testament examples, including the themes of the Apocalypse. “Time can go back,” he wrote in the article “Scriabin and Christianity” (1915), “the whole course of modern history, which terrible force turned from Christianity to Buddhism and Theosophy testifies to this. Sharp assessments of theosophical views are also contained in Mandelstam's articles of 1922 - "On the Nature of the Word" and "The Nineteenth Century."

... Kamenev's preface to his book on Gogol.- To the book of memoirs by A. Bely "The Beginning of the Century", published in the winter of 1933 (not to the book about Gogol). The preface said: "Sincerely considering himself ... a participant and one of the leaders of a major cultural and historical movement, the writer actually wandered all this period in the most musty backyards of history, culture and literature."

... at the evening of poetry by O. M. in the editorial office of the Literary Gazette ...- The evening took place on November 10, 1932. “The spectacle was majestic,” one of the young eyewitnesses shared his impressions in a private letter. - Mandelstam, the gray-bearded patriarch, shamanized for two and a half hours. He read all his poems (of the last two years) - in chronological order! These were such terrible spells that many were frightened. Even Pasternak was frightened, murmuring: - I envy your freedom. For me you are the new Khlebnikov. And just as alien. I need freedom. (...) Only V. B. (Shklovsky) showed some courage: - A new poet O. E. Mandelstam has appeared! However, it is impossible to speak about these verses “on the forehead”: ... I am a man of the era of the Moscow seamstress, Look how my jacket is bristling ... Or: ... I am a tram cherry of a terrible time And I don’t know why I live ... “Young people” “dissociated themselves” from Mandelstam . And Mandelstam called them "Chicago" poets (American "advertising poetry"). He answered with the arrogance of a captive tsar or ... a captive poet ”(see: Eikhenbaum B. O literature. M., 1987. P. 532).

“I led myself by the hand through the streets ...”- Line-variant to the poem "Where there are baths, paper spinners ..." (1932)

... terrible shadows of Ukraine and Kuban ...- "Shadows" of refugees from the famine-stricken areas of the South of Russia. See No. 7. This poem (“Cold Spring. Hungry Old Crimea ...”) figured in the Mandelstam case of 1934 - as a slander on rural construction. The number of those who died in the famine of 1932 - 1933 peasants varies from 5 to 8 million (see Znamya, 1989, No. 2, pp. 176-177).

In Pravda, an unsigned cellar appeared ...- In the library copy of this issue of Pravda dated August 30, 1933, the article has a signature (S. Rosenthal), there are no words about “servant prose” in it. N. Ya. Mandelstam remained convinced that she had seen the issue where the article was published as an editorial. Earlier, on June 17, a review of a similar tone and content appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta (N. Oruzeinikov).

... called Anna Andreevna Cassandra.- In a poem written in December 1917:

I did not search in blooming moments

Your lips, Cassandra, your eyes, Cassandra,

But in December - a solemn vigil -

The memory torments us...

And in December of the seventeenth year

We have lost everything...

Dear killer whale, Cassandra,

You moan, you burn - why

The sun of Alexander shone

A hundred years ago, did everyone shine?

Someday in the capital of a shaloy,

At a wild holiday on the banks of the Neva,

At the sounds of a disgusting ball

Tear the scarf from the beautiful head ...

(According to the text restored by N. Ya. Mandelstam)

“The Solemn Vigil” is an image correlated here with the celebration of Christmas. In the Russian Church, the celebration of this holiday was combined with the remembrance of "the deliverance of the Church and the Russian state from the invasion of the Gauls" and with a memorial service for Alexander the Blessed.

... they managed to say about his ethics, ideology, intolerance ...- This rightfully applies to representatives of the idealistic current of Russian social thought - religious philosophers, historians and sociologists of culture - who managed to speak out before their mass expulsion in 1922. In Sat. "De profun-dis" (From the abyss. 1918) was attended by: N. A. Berdyaev, S. N. Bulgakov, P. B. Struve, S. L. Frank and others. Since the end of 1917, the Apocalypse of Our Time by V. Rozanov was published in separate issues, where there are words about the “Iron Curtain” that has descended over Russian history.

... Herzen's story about his conversation with Shchepkin ...- In the obituary article "Mikhail Semenovich Shchepkin".

... "ten heavens cost us the earth" ...- From Mandelstam's poem "Let's glorify, brothers, the twilight of freedom ..." (1918):

... Well, let's try: huge, clumsy,

Squeaky steering wheel.

The earth is floating. Take heart, men!

Like a plow dividing the ocean.

We will remember in the letey cold,

That the earth cost us ten heavens.

By this time, OM had developed heart disease and severe shortness of breath. Yevgeny Yakovlevich always said that O. M.'s shortness of breath is not only a physical disease, but also a "class" one. This is confirmed by the situation of the first seizure, which occurred in the mid-twenties. Marshak came to visit us and for a long time, touchingly explained to O. M. what poetry is. It was an official sentimental line. As always, Samuil Yakovlevich spoke excitedly, modulating his voice in waves. He is a first-class catcher of souls - weak and bossy. O. M. did not argue - he did not have commensurability with Marshak. But soon he could not stand it: he suddenly heard a horn that interrupted Marshak's smooth reasoning, and he suffered the first attack of angina pectoris. - note 1977

Decree of the Central Committee on Literature- Resolution of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) of June 18, 1925 "On the policy of the party in the field of fiction." The resolution spoke of the continuation of the class struggle in society and on the "literary front" with an emphasis on "peace organization work."

. wifli- apparently, LIFLI - Leningrad Institute of Philosophy, Literature, Linguistics and History (faculties of Leningrad University, which existed separately for some time); Zubov Institute- The Institute of Art History in Leningrad, established before the revolution, c. V. P. Zubov (closed in 1930), its verbal department was considered a haven for philologists of the “formal school”; Institute of red professors with a three-year program in economics, history and philosophy was established in 1921 with the aim of training party professors.

... made Mandelstam talk about poetry ...- See: Rozhdestvensky V. Pages of life. M.; L., 1962. C. 129 - 131. On the margins of one copy of the book there is a note by N. Ya. Mandelstam: “O. M. is a “meaning lover”, and every conversation about poetry was ideological.”

bird language Herzen called the language, which in his time explained the pupils of the "monasteries of German idealism" ("Past and Thoughts", ch. XXV ); lion cub that raises a fiery paw- an image from Mandelstam's poem "The language of a cobblestone is more understandable to me than a dove ..." (1923), in Herzen - "a lion cub of a gigantic revolution", cherished and fattened by "aristocratic milk" ("Past and Thoughts", ch. XXX).

Pike bone stuck in underwood -

Who else will you kill?

Who else can you glorify?

What lies are you making up?

That underwood cartilage: rather tear out the keys -

And you will find a pike bone.

"Poetry is power," he said in Voronezh...- Mandelstam then said the same to S. B. Rudakov: “Poetic thought is a terrible thing, and they are afraid of it” and: “Genuine poetry rebuilds life, and they are afraid of it” (given in a letter from Rudakov to his wife dated June 23, 1935 - See: E. G. Gershtein, New about Mandelstam, Paris, 1986, p. 202).

In the verses of the thirties there are both completely direct, head-on statements, and a conscious encryption of meaning. In Voronezh, a “lover of poetry” of a semi-military type once came to us, what we now call an “art critic in civilian clothes,” only rougher, and for a long time he was curious about what was hidden under “a wave runs in a wave, breaking a wave’s backbone” ... “Not about five-year plans whether? O. M. walked around the room and asked in surprise: “Really?” ... “What to do,” I later asked O. M., “if they look for a hidden meaning in everything?” “To be surprised,” replied O. M. The second plan did not immediately reach me, and O. M., knowing that I could be “inside,” did not comment on the poems: sincere surprise could, if not save, then at least alleviate fate. Idiocy and a complete lack of understanding of things were valued among us and served as an excellent recommendation to both the arrested person and the employee. - note 1977

... won ... Averbakh with his RALP.- In February 1926, the Extraordinary Conference of Proletarian Writers condemned the line of "old fasting" pursued by the magazine "On Post" (S. Rodov, G. Lelevich, I. Vardin). The core of the "new posting" was made up of: the executive editor of the new journal "At the Literary Post" L. Averbakh, Yu. Libedinsky, V. Ermilov, V. Kirshon, A. Fadeev and others. In May 1928, headed by General Secretary L. Averbakh, a Russian Association proletarian writers (RAPP). It was liquidated, in connection with the creation of a single writers' organization, by a resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of April 23, 1932.

... in three or four literary articles ...- We are talking about the articles "Storm and Onslaught" (journal "Russian Art". 1923. No. 1), "Vulgata" (ibid. No. 2 - 3), "Literary Moscow" I and II (journal "Russia" . 1922. No. 1 and 2) and, probably, "The Duchess's Fan" (gaz. "Vecherny Kiev". 1929. 25 Jan.). Attacks against Akhmatova were contained in the first two articles.

... published an article in the Kharkov newspaper ...- The article "Letter on Russian Poetry" was published in the Rostov newspaper "Soviet South" (1922. Jan. 21). A review of the Almanac of the Muses (1916) has the title "On Modern Poetry", in which Mandelstam redirected Pushkin's words to Akhmatova about "a shabbyly dressed but majestic wife."

... he was forced to make a report on acmeism and they were waiting for "revelations" ...- It was in February 1935 "at a wide meeting of the Voronezh Writers' Union." According to Chairman St. Stoicheva, then “a report was delivered on acmeism in order to reveal Mandelstam’s attitude to his past. In his speech, Mandelstam showed that he had not learned anything, that he was who he was, and that he remained ”(from a speech by Stoichev at the party meeting of the SSP of the Voronezh Region in April 1936). Stoichev repeated this information about Mandelstam on September 28, 1936, in response to a request from the central Union of Writers about the state of affairs with "exposing the class enemy on the literary front" (TsGALI, f. 631).

He answered something similar to the Leningrad writers at his evening at the Press House.- Speaking there on March 2, 1933, Mandelstam to the question: “Are you the same Mandelstam who was an acmeist?” - replied that "he is the same Mandelstam who was, is and will be a friend of his friends, a comrade-in-arms of his associates, a contemporary of Akhmatova" (unpublished entry from the diary of El. A. Millior).

... an attempt to renounce for 22 years was caused by hooting about acmeism ...- In 1923 (December 25), Mandelstam wrote to L.V. Gornung: “... the sense of time is changing. Acmeism for 23 years is not the same as in 1913. Or rather, there is no acmeism at all. He wanted to be only the "conscience" of poetry. He is the judgment of poetry, not poetry itself. Do not despise contemporary poets, they are blessed by the past” (see: Lit. Review, 1986, No. 9, p. 110).

... "one in all ways" ...- From Mandelstam's 1932 poem "Oh, how we love to be hypocrites ...".

When we were in the Caucasus in 1921, Kablukov died...- He died earlier, in December 1919, when Mandelstam was in the Crimea. The Public Library in Leningrad keeps his diaries with entries about Mandelstam. The article "Scriabin and Christianity" is not in the surviving small part of his archive.

In the drafts of the "Egyptian Mark" mockery of Parnok was preserved ... This is a clear allusion to the Scriabin report.- This refers to the following place, which was not included in the final text of the story: “The business card died ingloriously, for underpaid five rubles, and wasn’t it in it that Parnok, on the eve of the fall of the monarchy, read his speech“ Theosophy as a world evil ”in the Turchaninov mansion and dined at the invitation of a secret Catholic Volkonsky in Donon's office with the Tatars and the Brazilian attaché? And wasn't it in it that he had to enter the frozen sphere of the supreme political ether in order to preach to the pretty girl chewing the straw of the English "th" his theory about the Habsburgs? Now everything was falling apart. Without a business card it was impossible to stick one's head in either the Germanophiles or the Theosophists.

Where and when Mandelstam read his report on Scriabin is not clear.

“Pravda in Greek means “Mriya” ...- The cynical joke of V. Kataev (“Mriya” - Ukrainian “dream”) is given by Mandelstam in the “Fourth Prose”.

... an oath to the fourth estate appeared ... it was not by chance that those on whom the distribution of goods depended were so coldly accepted.- The poem "January 1, 1924", where this oath was pronounced (see note to p. 107), appeared in the journal "Russian Contemporary" (1924. No. 2). The critic G. Lelevich then wrote: “Mandelstam’s blood is thoroughly saturated with the lime of the old world, and you don’t believe him when he finally begins to talk with doubt about the “oath to the wonderful fourth estate.” No oath will bring back the dead” (Young Guard, 1924, No. 7/8, p. 263).

... "Here I stand, I can not help it..."- The words of M. Luther, made by Mandelstam at the beginning of the poem in 1915

... he could not help but feel like a "drying appendage of previously taken out bread." -

... And finds its place

Callous stepson of centuries -

Shrinking Attachment

Previously taken out bread -

from Mandelstam's poem "How the bread dough grows ...", facsimile printed in Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on September 23, 1922

Ulenspiegel affair- the case of Mandelstam with the translator of The Legend of Ulenspiegel A. G. Gornfeld and the publishing house Zemlya i Fabrika, which ordered Mandelstam's literary adaptation of Ulenspiegel. Because of D. Zaslavsky's impudently slanderous feuilleton "On modest plagiarism and cheeky hack-work" (Lit. Gaz. 1929. May 7), a major public scandal erupted. At the beginning of 1930, the case, with political trials, passed to the Central Control Commission of the CPSU (b).

Lominadze did not die, but was simply removed from Georgia. - note 1977

The verses say that they cannot be taken away ...- “You couldn’t take away the moving lips” and “Yes, I’m lying in the ground, moving my lips” - lines from Mandelstam’s poems included in the “First Voronezh Notebook”.

... before the "beginning of terrible things" ...- That is, until August 1936

... "national in form, socialist in content" ...- The definition of culture under the dictatorship of the proletariat - in this form it was given by Stalin at the 16th Party Congress (June 1930).

... Shevchenko's complaints ... about the persistence of poetry ...- “I knew very well that painting is my future profession, my daily bread,” T. G. Shevchenko wrote, recalling the years of study at the Academy of Arts. - And instead of studying its deep mysteries, and even under the guidance of such a teacher as the immortal Bryullov, I composed poems for which no one paid me a penny, and which finally deprived me of my freedom, and which, despite the almighty inhuman prohibition , I'm still quietly dripping. And sometimes I even think about embossing these whiny, skinny children of mine. Indeed, this restless vocation is strange” (“Diary”, entry July 1, 1850).

...a mouth that says "no"...- In the draft versions of the poem "For the explosive valor of the coming centuries ..." this place reads:

The newspaper spits not with tobacco blood,

The maiden does not knock with her knuckles, -

Human hot twisted mouth

He is angry, he sings, he speaks.

(See: Semenko Ir. Poetics of the late Mandelstam. Rome, 1966, p. 60).

... "cherries of Moscow ends" ...- According to the reading of I. M. Semenko, it is correct: “the ink of the Moscow mud”.

In "Astrakh" this is a master's coat, for which he was reproached ...- We are talking about a poem in 1931, the beginning of which:

I drink to war asters

for everything that reproached me:

For a master's coat, for asthma,

for the bile of the Petersburg day.

"Military asters" - the image of officer's epaulettes.

... in the publishing house of Rakovsky's sister ...- In the Kharkiv publishing house "Help", which was owned by A. Rakovskaya-Petrescu. The magazine Khudozhestvennaya Mysl was published there, in issue 2 of which (1922, Fvvr.-March) it was reported that the publishing house had acquired Mandelstam's essay "Fur Coat". In an abbreviated form, the essay was published by the Rostov newspaper Sovetsky Yug (1922. Feb. 1). It begins with a story about the purchase by the poet of a hot "old man's" fur coat at a fur trade in Rostov.

... one noble ... lady ...- O. D. Kameneva.

The ink of the Moscow mud was golden,

And the truck puffed at the gate,

And walked through the streets to palaces and seas

Self-recording black people...

Shut up: nothing, never, no one,

There in the conflagration time sings ...

Shut up! I don't trust anyone anymore

I'm just like you, pedestrian

But it brings me back to my shame

Your menacing twisted mouth...

There is a house in the center of Moscow…- A house in the passage of the Art Theater No. 2, built for writers in 1931.

Valya Berestov. - note 1977

... they ordered to make a renaissance, but something like a cafe "Renaissance" came out ...- According to N. Ya. Mandelstam, such an image, related to "socialist construction", was present in the first, destroyed chapter of the "Fourth Prose".

…ABOUT. M. talks about a young poet ...- In the essay "Army of Poets" (1923).

Poems about the stars- seven-line "With moving grapes These worlds threaten us ..." (from "The verse" in about the unknown soldier ").

Song about a woman- the poem "Your narrow shoulders blush under whips ...", written back in Moscow before his arrest.

…ABOUT. M. remembered "sitting in a sleigh" ...- The image at the beginning of Vladimir Monomakh's "Instructions": "sitting on a sleigh, think in your soul and praise God, who guides me these days a sinner." Means: at the end of life, before death (in ancient Rus', the body of the deceased was transported on a sleigh)

Living in Assyria, one cannot help but think about the Assyrian...- The image of the "Assyrian" arose in Mandelstam's prose "Journey to Armenia" (1933): "King Shapukh - Arshak thinks so - got the better of me and - worse than that He took my air. The Assyrian holds my heart." From the same passage, which is a transcription of the Armenian historical chronicle, the expression “one extra day” was taken from N. Ya. Mandelstam (see on p. 207).

... it is worth looking for a denunciation about this poem.- According to A. K. Gladkov (an unpublished diary), in 1949, at the Lubyanka, they tried to get him to admit “that among Mandelstam’s poems about the Caucasus there are anti-Soviet ones.”

"Lead Pea"- from a quatrain by A. Akhmatova (1937):

For such a buffoon

Frankly speaking,

me a lead pea

Waiting for the secretary.

“.Why, when I think about him, in front of me all the heads are mounds of heads? ...”- Wed. in "Ode":

He hung from the podium, as if from a mountain,

In the mounds of heads ...

Mounds go into the distance of human heads:

I'm shrinking there, they won't notice me,

But in affectionate books and in games, children

I will rise again to say that the sun is shining.

According to N. Ya. Mandelstam, of the entire Ode, O. M. wanted to leave only this last quatrain.

... "people like you..."- From the lost poems of Mandelstam about the Armenian exiles who made shoes in Voronezh. N. Ya. Mandelstam remembered:

People like you

with eyes drilled into the skull ...

Judges like you

deprived you of the cold of mulberries ...

Even wives and children almost ceased to be deported ...- In relation to family members of "traitors to the motherland", the very principle of collective responsibility was introduced by a CEC resolution of June 8, 1934: exile "to remote regions of Siberia" for 5 years - for "unknown", for "knowing" - imprisonment for a period of 5 up to 10 years old. This resolution at the same time rehabilitated the words: “motherland”, “family”, “punishment”, which had not been accepted in the administrative lexicon before.

a small museum on Kropotkin street.- The Museum of New Western Art, which included the collections of S.I. Shchukin and I.A. Morozov and located in former home the last one (No. 2). Disbanded in 1948

... seeing a series of drawings "Weather Director" at the first OST exhibition...- A series of illustrations by A. Tyshler for the play by A. B. Mariengof "Weather Director". Together with an oil painting on the same theme, they were exhibited at the 2nd exhibition of the Society of Easel Painters in May 1926.

... Altman's neighbor ... Italian by nationality ...- Artist Giovanni Grandi (Ivan Antonovich), who worked in Russia from 1913 to 1922.

... I later found this idea with Berdyaev ...- N. A. Berdyaev wrote that the most unacceptable for him was "the feeling of God as a force, as omnipotence and power." Only God the Son reconciles “with the sufferings of creation”. Pure monotheism for Berdyaev is “the last form of idolatry” (Self-knowledge. Paris, 1949, p. 190).

. “Children, you have become impoverished, you have reached the rags”- from the old French epic "Sons of Aymon". Mandelstam's translation was made in 1922.

... "straightness of our speech"- from Madelstam's poems on the death of A. Bely:

The straightforwardness of our thought is not only scary for children,

Not paper ten, but news save people!

Bryusov's poems about historical eras- "Lanterns" (sat. "Wreath").

. Perhaps Keats would understand this...- The following refers to "Lines about the tavern "Sea Maiden"" by J. Keats.

...about the release of the "Short Course".- Chronological shift: by the time Stalin's "Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks" was published (September 1938), Mandelstam was already in prison.

... the collected works of Stalin that began to appear.- Apparently, they mean "Questions of Leninism" - a collection of articles and speeches by Stalin, which came out in new and repeated editions starting as early as 1925.

Larousse- universal dictionary French compiled by P. Larousse.

« Corardens"- a book of poems by V.I. Ivanov (Parts 1 and 2. St. Petersburg, 1911 - 1912).

O. M ... looked for success from poets ...- Further, the following poems are mentioned: “God the Father” by A. M. Dobrolyubov (“Eagles under me, eagles speaking ...”, collection “Natura naturans ...”, 1895); “There is a strange song of an Arab whose name is nothing…” K. Balmont (collection “Only Love”, 1903); poem by V. A. Komarovsky in his Sat. "First pier", 1913; “Around the mossy bell tower ...” by V. A. Borodaevsky (collection of “Poems”, 1909); "Chimerisando" by A. Lozina-Lozinsky ("I played chess with one Jew, it's strange...", collection "Pavement", 1916); "1920" by B. Lapin (collection of B. Lapin and E. Gabrilovich "The Lightning Man", 1922) and his own "The Forest Lives" (collection of "1922 Book of Poems", 1923).

... Lomonosov's "remoteness" ...- With the expression "conjugation of distant ideas" Lomonosov emphasizes in "Rhetoric" the constructive nature of the verbal image with a focus on the word, deployed in time and space. This expression was very much appreciated by Mandelstam.

... "you must be hot as a flame ..."- From Bryusov: "You must be proud, like a banner ..." - at the beginning of his program poem "To the Poet" (collection "All the tunes", 1909).

This photograph dates back to…- Published in Birzhevye Vedomosti on December 13, 1913. The photo shows the participants in the debate that took place on December 10 after N. I. Kulbin's lecture on futurism - Mandelstam, N. Burliuk, V. Piast, G. Ivanov and others. Mayakovsky and Chukovsky did not participate in the dispute, and they are not in the photo. For a derogatory caption to the picture, a group of poets called the editors to court.

At May, he noted "Pompeian" ...- The poem "Dancer" ("Inspired by the dance without rest ..."). Further, "You do not chase the wayward rhyme ..." and "After the execution in Geneva" by K. Sluchevsky are mentioned. Book An. Grigorieva - "Poems of Apollon Grigorieva". SPb., 1846 (the only lifetime edition in 50 copies).

Prose translation of "Purgatory"- translation of iambic prose by M. A. Gorbov (M., 1898).

... he once tried to translate Mallarme ...- In the translation of Mandelstam (1910), the beginning of the poem by St. Mallarme "The flesh is saddened ..."

...in some archive...- Mandelstam's translations from the Old French epic, prepared for publication as a separate book, were found in the IMLI archive. Of these, the Life of St. Alexei” was supposed, according to N. Ya. Mandelstam, to appear in the unpublished 6th issue of the magazine “Russia” for 1925 (simultaneously with the end of the “White Guard” by M. Bulgakov)

... those couplets, where the hard fate of a woman is predicted.- It is said about the poem “Your narrow shoulders blush under whips ...” (1934).

... an unfortunate princess who married the brother of the royal bride.- Mandelstam read "Notes" book. Natalya Borisovna, daughter of Field Marshal Sheremetev, who married I. A. Dolgorukov, brother of the bride of Peter II. After the death of the latter, the whole family was subjected to severe persecution.

"Exile and hard labor"- the magazine "Katorga and exile", published by the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers. The society was closed (“of its own free will”) in 1935, its publishing house and magazine were liquidated.

Tenishev School - high school in St. Petersburg, established in 1900 by Prince. V. N. Tenishev within the commercial schools that existed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance. Mandelstam was a pupil of the school from the day of its foundation until the spring graduation of 1907.

...his book that no one wanted to print...- Notes of a Contemporary. I. Lezhnev presented the manuscript of the book to the Politburo as an "extended application" for admission to the party (see: KLE. Vol. 4. Art. 94). The book was published in 1934 - the petition was granted.

... Rodin's book about French Gothic.- The great sculptor's book on French cathedrals ("Les cathedra-les de France. Paris, 1914, 1921).

…some lovely rose garden…- Probably a type of medieval Catholic prayer book associated with the cult of the Virgin Mary. The Dance of Death is a book of engravings on this subject, popular in the late Middle Ages, with poetic captions.

"Chapter Four"- in the "Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks" section "On Dialectical and Historical Materialism", written by Stalin.

... Buddhism, understood according to Vladimir Solovyov ...- About “Buddhism” in religion, triumphant in “recent theosophy”, about its penetration into other spiritual spheres as “poetry of non-existence”, hostile to “our entire (Christian) history”, Mandelstam wrote in the article “The Nineteenth Century” (1922). Regardless of religion, Buddhism, according to Mandelstam, constitutes the “internal bias” of European thought of the 19th century, which gravitates towards the rejection of active cognition - the “panmethodologism” (an expression of Evg. Trubetskoy) of this century marks indifference to the very subject of knowledge. In the system of moral philosophy Vl. Solovyov, Buddhism historically appears as “religious and moral nihilism”, resolving the duality existing between nature and spirit in general indifference, which is the same: “fundamentally abolishing every object and every motive for reverence, for pity and for spiritual struggle” (“Justification of Good” , words from the Table of Contents).

"Campaign of barbarian carts"- an image in Mandelstam's 1914 poem ("On the times of simple and rude ..."), which serves as an expression of prehistoric "Scythianism".

Dramatic scenes by Akhmatova- a play in prose "Enuma Elish", written in evacuation in Tashkent and destroyed by the author in 1944.

"The party is an upside down church..."- According to other memoirs of N. Ya. Mandelstam (Second Book. Paris, 1972, p. 114), Mandelstam carried out this idea in a conversation with major party members, colleagues in the Union of Cities, on the day of the uprising on July 3, 1917: “He told them about the end of culture and how the party that staged the demonstration is organized (the "upside down church" or something close to it). He noticed that his “colleagues” were listening to him with hostility, and only later did he find out that both of them were members of the Central Committee ... "

...I read O.M.'s epigram to Luppol. -

I don't need a Roman dome

Or beautiful far away

I prefer the view of Luppola

Under the shadow of Jean-Richard Blok.

The epigram was prompted by a newspaper photograph depicting I. Luppol and J.-R. Blok upon his arrival at the First All-Union Congress of Writers.

... poems by Klychkov under the name of Mandelstam.- This is how S. Klychkov’s poem “A star is burning outside the window ...” was printed in issue 4 of the Krasnaya Niva magazine for 1923.

... when the fate of Klychkov and Vasiliev was being decided ... they read that the death penalty was abolished, but the terms of imprisonment were increased to twenty years.- We are talking about a law adopted by the Central Executive Committee of the USSR on October 2, 1937 (published in Pravda on October 3). Previously, according to the "Basic Principles of the Criminal Legislation of the USSR" (Article 18), the terms of imprisonment were provided for no more than 10 years, now they have been increased to 25 years in cases of espionage and sabotage - in order, as it was said in the new law, "to provide the court with opportunities to choose for these crimes not only capital punishment (execution), but also imprisonment for longer periods.

S. A. Klychkov was sentenced to death on October 8, 1937 (see: Novy Mir. 1988. No. 11. P. 266). Date of execution of P. N. Vasiliev - July 16, 1937

“Oh, how many times she loves the oarlock creaking…”- From a poem by Mandelstam in 1922 on the theme of “the abduction of Europe” (“With pink foam of fatigue at soft lips ...”): ... A wide deck, a herd of sheep And a flicker of fish behind a high stern! With her, the oarless rower floats on. Addressed to N. Ya. Mandelstam.

... Pushkin's words- "... between the children of the insignificant world ..." - Saying that Pushkin's words were understood by Veresaev completely wrong (in the spirit of Pushkin's "mob" - hence the contemptuous definition), N. Ya. Mandelstam means the theory of the double - in life and in poetry - the attitude of the poet to reality (Veresaev writes about this in his book: In two plans. M., 1929). Quoted below: “I’m walking with bearded men, a passer-by” - from Mandelstam’s 1913 poem “Snow in the calm suburbs ...”

... did not allow himself any attacks against the "philistinism".- Characteristic are the words of Mandelstam, said, according to the memoirs of E.K. Osmerkina, visiting them in 1937. Mandelstam said that Zoshchenko's characters are no longer funny now. "They are either martyrs or all heroes."

... called Herzen ... master.- In the Fourth Prose.

... everything valuable in his life he called fun ...- Further, Mandelstam's report on Scriabin and the poem "And still on Athos ..." (1915) are quoted.

"Petropolis"- the Petrograd publishing house of J. N. Bloch, which since 1922 printed its books in Berlin. An agreement was signed on Mandelstam's Tristia on November 5, 1920, but they came out only in September 1922. The book, which had already begun printing, was forbidden by N.L. city ​​- TsGALI, f. 1610).

I had to find the right person...- Such, according to N. Ya. Mandelstam, was L. Nazarevskaya, the daughter of M. Gorky.

...they died at his friend Leni Landsberg's.- Poems later found. In his copy of "Poems" by Mandelstam, L. Landsberg entered the poem "Where the night casts anchors ..." (1917?) About the "deaf feeders of darkness" who fell away from the "tree of life." Another poem - "Everything is alien to us in the indecent capital ..." (1918) - was preserved by A. G. Gabrichevsky.

At the beginning of the revolution, his father was shot ...- General B. Rudakov served in the World War on the South-Western Front, in the civil war - apparently, at Kolchak, in 1920, at the call of Brusilov, he joined the Red Army and, for refusing to condemn his past, was shot a year later along with one of his sons (two died at the front). This and other clarifications concerning the Rudakov family, as well as the circumstances of the loss of the archives of Mandelstam and N. Gumilyov from the widow of S. B. Rudakov, are contained in the book by E. G. Gershtein “New about Mandelstam” (Paris, 1986). There are also given in large excerpts letters from S. B. Rudakov to his wife from Voronezh, where he was in exile from April 1935 to June 1936.

... we warned Rudakov that it could hurt him to get to know us ...- Judging by Rudakov's letters, the NKVD authorities were aware of his literary work. "WITH. B. Rudakov told me that he was convinced there that, while studying Mandelstam, he made incorrect choice"(Gershtein E. G. New about Mandelstam. S. 266).

The woman I'm talking about...- We are talking about N. Bukharin's wife A. M. Larina, who kept in her memory his testamentary letter “To the Future Generation of Party Leaders”.

The record library of Sergei Ignatievich Bernstein was destroyed ...- The music library has been created since 1920 within the framework of the Institute of the Living Word founded then in Petrograd. In 1925, Mandelstam's voice was recorded for the second time. The creation of an archive of “living voices” (about 200 records) at the Institute of Art History was reported by newspapers in 1927. From the surviving part of the collection, recordings of four poems by Mandelstam are currently known from reproductions.

... the rhyme has always been the subject of speculation with us for all sorts of Nikulins ...- The poem "I drink for military asters ..." was not published, but critics used quotes from it to politically discredit Mandelstam. L. Nikulin on the example of what the poet drinks for:

For a rose in the cockpit of a Rolls-Royce

and the oil of Parisian paintings, -

contrasted the attitude towards Paris of Mandelstam and Mayakovsky (in the book: Youth of a Hero. M., 1933. P. 233).

...in a new writers' house...- In house number 17 on Lavrushinsky Lane, a whole residential complex for writers, partly built already in 1937.

New Moscow... took the first records...- In May 1937, the Papaninites landed in the North Pole region, in June a record flight over North Pole the crew of V. Chkalov made it to Vancouver.

Luppol resolved the dispute ...- “Now Comrade Luppol announced to me that there is no work for me at Goslitizdat for a year and is not expected,” Mandelstam wrote to V. Stavsky on the eve of his fateful departure to Samatikha in March 1938 (TsGALI, f. 631).

Narbut was no more... Many were no more.- V. I. Narbut was arrested in October 1936, A. O. Morgulis at the end of the same year, S. A. Klychkov - already upon the return of the Mandelstams from Voronezh - on July 31, 1937.

... "woe, grief, fear, noose and pit" ...- From N. Gumilyov's poem "Star Horror" (1921).

Leo Tolstoy already knew about this...- Pierre Bezukhov in the epilogue of "War and Peace" says, referring to the coup d'état, that "everything is too strained and will certainly burst." Tolstoy notes that "since the government has existed," people always say this, "having peered into the actions of any kind of government."

... a crack where he was allowed to look ...- First large selection from Mandelstam's unpublished poems he published in 1964 the magazine "Moscow" (No. 8).

"Nugget"- G. Shelest's story about the behavior of a communist in the camp, published in Izvestia on November 5, 1962, simultaneously with the appearance of A. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir (1962. No. 11).

...there on the stairs he had an attack of angina pectoris. - According to the medical certificate that survived in the Mandelstam archive, the day of the incident is known - May 25, 1937.

They called an ambulance...- Judging by another medical certificate, the episode with the "fixer" and the withdrawal to the police happened on June 19. At the very end of the month, the Mandelstams left for Savelovo.

I communicated this word to Anna Andreevna, and it got into the poem.- In one of the stanzas of the second part of the "Poem without a Hero":

You ask my contemporaries:

Convicts, stopers, captives,

And we will tell you

How they lived in unconscious fear,

How children were raised for the chopping block,

For the dungeon and for the prison.

... "holy fool" from the poems of O. M ...- From the poem "Not believing Sunday's miracle ...", written in 1916, when Mandelstam spent a day in Alexandrov with the Tsvetaev sisters.

former rapper...- From RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), formed in 1923 with the aim of creating a mass revolutionary musical repertoire. Disbanded on the basis of the resolution of the Central Committee "On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations" on April 23, 1932.

... after reading Kossior's article and learning that, despite all his articles, he, too, was arrested.- The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of Ukraine, S. V. Kosior, after the repressions that took place in Ukraine, stigmatized in his speeches (December 1937) the dead "Lyubchenko" (A. P. Lyubchenko - Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars), "Yakirs" and others , who wanted to "establish fascist power", but for the loss of vigilance was removed from work in the republic. Appointed in January 1938 as Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, he was arrested in May of the same year.

There were many people. Now I think it was not Surkov who slipped the money. - note 1977

In Kyiv during the bombing…- At the end of August 1919, when the troops of the Red Army left Kyiv. The impressions of these days were reflected in Mandelstam’s “Poems about the Unknown Soldier” (“in Kiev in August 19, he stood at the window for a long time at night, watching the shells trace the sky,” wrote N. Ya. Mandelstam) and in a poem about the Kiev “zhinka ”, whose husband was shot (No. 47).

... regretted that these poems already have an addressee.- The poem "Kidneys smell like a sticky oath ..." (1937) is addressed to N. E. Shtempel.

He had to wait until the winter.- V. Stenich was arrested on the night of November 14-15, 1937.

Kaverin. He read the Memoirs and said: "You should not have remembered this." - note 1977

Orlov - note 1977

... his brother Nikolai, a priest, then an aircraft designer, and in the year 37 - a camp resident ...- N. A. Bruni, pilot in the First World War, awarded with three Georges, participant civil war on the side of the Reds, after graduating from it he took the priesthood, served in Kozelsk, then in Klin. Before his arrest in 1934, he made technical translations at TsAGI. Known are Bruni's poems written in the Ukhta camp ("... Bury even the thought of freedom, Even bury the thought of it!" - March 1936). In 1938 he was shot. His wife's name was Anna Alexandrovna (Nadya - erroneously).

That Yezhov, with whom we were in the thirtieth year in Sukhum at the government dacha ...- Now it is documented that it was the future head of the NKVD. At that time (April 1930) Deputy Commissar for Agriculture, in the same year he was at the top of the party apparatus, becoming the head of the Orgraspredotdel in the Central Committee.

Stalin to him, shining, stretches out ... his hand ...- Congratulating on the Order of Lenin - an award "for outstanding success in the leadership of the NKVD in the implementation of government tasks." Yezhov was awarded the Order at a special meeting of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR on July 27, 1937. At the same time, A. Vyshinsky was awarded the Order of Lenin “for successful work to strengthen revolutionary legality”.

...with a musician who collects Abkhazian folklore.- M. Kovacs. About him, about the “Georgian, radio specialist” mentioned below, An. Kakavadze and other residents of the Sukhumi government dacha (“Ordzhonikidze Rest House”) are in Mandelstam’s preparatory notes for “Journey to Armenia” (see: Vopr. Lit. 1968. No. 4. P. 185-188).

...it's not hard to guess what happened to him...- Of the 1966 delegates to the "congress of victors" (XVII Party Congress, January-February 1934), 1108 were destroyed in the next few years.

... in 37 Lakoba was no longer alive.- N. A. Lakoba died on December 28, 1936, poisoned by Beria. He was buried with honors in the main square of Sukhumi. In the summer of 1937, an order came: “throw the coffin of the enemy of the people of Lakoba from the grave, destroy the monument” (see: Zvezda. 1988. No. 8. P. 156).

On the day of Mayakovsky's death...- April 14, 1930 “The society that gathered in Sukhum,” recorded by Mandelstam, “received the news of the death of the original poet with shameful indifference. On the same evening, the Cossack girls danced and sang swirling student songs in a crowd at the piano.

Re-reading the book in 1977, I saw that I did not have a penny of optimism, although now life is easier than ever. - note 1977

Only women and churchmen (priests, deacons) - note 1977

... a few records obtained by O. M ...- Already upon arrival in Samatikha, Mandelstam shared his impressions of them in a letter to B. S. Kuzin (March 10, 1938): “It is curious: as soon as you wrote about Dvorak, I bought a record in Kalinin Slavic Dances No. 1 and No. 8 - really lovely . Beethoven. Processing of folk songs, richness of keys, clever fun and generosity” (see: Questions of the history of natural science and technology. 1987. No. З.С. 133).

... Stalin's review of Gorky's fairy tale ...- The inscription on the fairy tale "The Girl and Death", made on October 11, 1931 ... read Stalin's speech to the graduate cadets. - Chronological shift: Stalin delivered a speech in praise of "advanced science" at a reception for higher education workers on May 17, 1938, when Mandelstam had already been arrested.

... the virtuous "Zotovs" that Solzhenitsyn so accurately described. - In the story "The incident at the station Krechetovka."

... in those days, Shostakovich's symphony was noisy ...- The 5th, "lyrical-heroic" symphony, the Moscow premiere of which took place in the Great Hall of the Conservatory on January 29, 1938 (it was performed five times over the next two months). Mandelstam listened to her just before leaving for Samatikha in early March (“Not thought. Not mathematics. Not good. Let art: I do not accept!” He responded in a letter to B. S. Kuzin on March 10).

... longed for the "Hamburg bill".- That is, he wanted to determine the true dignity of the work, - with the utmost exactingness. V. Shklovsky's own expression (his book The Hamburg Account, 1928), based on an old legend about circus wrestlers in Hamburg.

... when he came to eat buckwheat porridge with us at the Herzen House ...- It was at the beginning of May 1922, just before the departure of V. Khlebnikov to the Novgorod province, where he died. The drawing by V. Tatlin was reproduced in the book “Unpublished Khlebnikov”, edited by N. I. Khardzhiev in 1940. The last two pencil sketches from Mandelstam were made by the artist A. A. Osmerkin on October 1, 1937 (collected by I. S. Zil -Bershtein in the Pushkin Museum).

... soon he had to go to Tiflis ...- At the Plenum of the Board of the Union of Writers on December 24-30, 1937, dedicated to the 750th anniversary of Rustaveli's poem. “In January 1938,” recalled I. G. Ehrenburg, “A.A. Fadeev showed me proofs of Novy Mir and said that he would try to return Mandelstam to the readers” (Prostor, Alma-Ata, 1965, No. 4, p. 58).

In our pocket we already had tickets to Samatiha ...- According to a certificate issued by N. Ya. Mandelstam, she was on vacation in the Samatikha health resort from March 8 to May 6, 1938.

I did not know then the composition of the trio ...- In addition to the person representing the NKVD, the "troika" of the Special Meeting (see note to p. 123) included one representative each from the Central Committee and the prosecutor's office. As a rule, the latter signed already prepared sentences.

... came to Tashkent to instruct the employees of the authorities ...- In September 1937; A. Andreev was one of the "emissaries" of the Politburo, sent then to the regions and republics to carry out a policy of terror (to Armenia - A. Mikoyan, to Bashkiria - A. Zhdanov, to the Ivanovo region - L. Kaganovich, etc., locally - N. Khrushchev in the Moscow region, L. Beria in Georgia). In Uzbekistan, upon the arrival of Andreev, the terror began with the announcement of the enemies of the people of the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the republic F. Khodzhaev and the first secretary of the Central Committee A. Ikramov.

... the old underground workers are undoubted philanthropists ... - what did they feel ...- What has been said can only be attributed to N. I. Bukharin.

... the murder of Uritsky ... was answered with a "hecatomb of corpses" ...- The chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, M. S. Uritsky, was killed by a former student L. Kanegisser (a good acquaintance of Mandelstam) on August 30, 1918. The Cheka responded to this by immediately shooting over 500 hostages in Petrograd (a message in Pravda on September 3 under the heading “Let the bourgeoisie trembles!").

Each such case is the Hermitage workers…- According to the May newspapers of 1931, the commission for checking the Hermitage found out that "alien elements worked among the museum staff until very recently." The accusations related to connections with White émigré circles (they took for storage the collections of "escaping White Guards", the son of the former Minister of Education kept the letters of Nicholas II to his father, etc.). The director S. N. Troinitsky, who had been replaced before, was directly called a “saboteur” (see: Smena. 1988. No. 18. P. 19). The campaign coincided with a major export sale of Hermitage paintings.

The case of historians began with arrests in the academic circles of Leningrad, including employees of the Pushkin House, in October 1929. There were no reports in the press. The case was grouped around Academician S. F. Platonov, accused of a monarchist conspiracy. Arrests, exile, executions continued for more than a year. On February 17, 1931, by the decision of the General Meeting of the Academy, N. P. Likhachev, M. K. Lyubavsky, S. F. Platonov, E. V. Tarle were excluded from the number of its full members.

About the case of dictionaries, see above.

Sagu- Central Asian State University in Tashkent.

... in front of the window on Sofiyka.- The reception of the NKVD was located on the Kuznetsk bridge in the courtyard of house number 24 (with access to Pushechnaya Street - the former Sofiyka).

Cannon street - note 1977

In Butyrki, they received only one transmission ...- Date of transfer - August 23, 1938. The receipt of the "Butyrskaya prison of the GUGB NKVD" for the amount of 48 rubles has been preserved. with the specified date.

I received a letter from the camp...- Mandelstam addressed it to his brother Alexander Emilievich: “I am in Vladivostok, S. VITL, barrack 11,” he wrote. - Received 5 years for k.r. e. decision of the CCA. The stage left Moscow from Butyrki on September 9 - arrived on October 12. SVITL - North-Eastern labor camps; k.r. e. - counter-revolutionary activity, which is the content of 14 paragraphs of the 58th article of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1926

... I received a summons for rehabilitation in the second case of 1938 ...- By the definition of the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the USSR on July 31, 1956, the decision of the OSO of August 2, 1938 was canceled. According to E. G. Gershtein, N. Ya. Mandelstam was told in the prosecutor's office that Mandelstam was accused of violating the passport regime and distributing poetry through journal editors. In the case of 1934, Mandelstam was rehabilitated thirty years later - by a decision of the Supreme Court on October 28, 1987. On the fate of the seized manuscripts of Mandelstam in a letter from a senior assistant Attorney General USSR dated November 9, 1987 states that “ measures taken search” it is not possible to establish “their location and the content of the text”.

Surkov ... appointed a commission on inheritance.- The Commission was created by the decision of the secretariat of the Writers' Union on June 16, 1957. Mandelstam's book "Poems", which is discussed below, in a truncated form and with a misinforming article by A. L. Dymshits, was published in the Big Series "Poet's Library" only in 1973 .

Mikoyan commissions- 70 "troika" commissions, created in 1954 to consider rehabilitation cases right in places of detention. Cases were prepared by lists according to articles of condemnation. AI Mikoyan then headed the Central Commission for Rehabilitation.

I saw and fell into despair ... - note 1977

Shklovsky was aware while Vasilisa lived. There is grace in her. - note 1977

... read in the newspapers about the arrival of Romain Rolland ...- In June-July 1935. During that visit, R. Rolland had, in his words, "meaningful conversations" with Stalin, N. Bukharin and G. Yagoda, raising the question of repressions before the former. After the trial of Bukharin and others, in April 1938, he informed St. Zweig that he sent twenty letters to the USSR in defense of "arrested friends" - and did not receive a word in response (see: Vopr. Lit. 1988. No. 11. P. 64-65, 73).

It was a fellow student of Evg. Emilievich

Shalamov's story...- The story "Sherry Brandy", according to V. Shalamov, "describes the same shipment in Vladivostok, where Mandelstam died and where the author of the story was a year earlier" (see: Moscow. 1988. No. 9. P. 133) .

... the defeat of universities from the beginning of the twenties.- By the Decree "On Higher Educational Institutions" of September 2, 1921, any autonomy of higher education was eliminated, the rector and other members of the university leadership were appointed by the People's Commissariat of Education. The decree was signed by V. I. Lenin immediately after the decision of the case of the "Petrograd military organization", among the executed in which, together with N. Gumilyov and others, there was a professorial group and in it the vice-rector (actually rector) of Petrograd University N. I. Lazarevsky (“convinced supporter of the democratic system,” is written in the official indictment). After a short struggle, N. S. Derzhavin, who shared all the provisions of the reform, became the new, already appointed, rector.

According to the information obtained from the archives of the Pulkovo Observatory, on October 14, 1938, the air temperature in Vladivostok rose sharply - from 4 to 12-15 °C, which is much higher than the average. This temperature remained until the end of the month (November 8 is already below zero).

David Isaakovich Zlotinsky also spoke about the last days of Mandelstam. The content of his letter to I. G. Ehrenburg is not reflected in the book of N. Ya. Mandelstam, and this letter is given here in full.

"23/11-1963

Dear Ilya Grigorievich!

For a long time already - almost two years - I have been going to write to you about one place in the 1st volume1 of your memoirs "People, Years, Events". We are talking about the fate of O. Mandelstam. You write (according to the Bryansk agronomist V. Merkulov, who visited you in 1952) that O. Mandelstam died in Kolyma at the end of 1938. Already imprisoned, in the most difficult conditions of the Beriev Kolyma, O. Mandelstam - according to V. Merkulov - retained good spirits and devotion to the muse of poetry: by the fire he read Petrarch's sonnets to his comrades in conclusion. I am afraid that Mandelstam's end was less romantic and more terrible.

I met O. Mandelstam at the end of summer or at the beginning of autumn (either the end of August, or the middle of September) of 1938, not in Kolyma, but at the Vladivostok “transfer” of Dalstroy, that is, the administration of the Kolyma camps.

Only those who were screened out by the medical commission (like me) settled on this transfer. The rest, after spending some time in transit, were loaded into steamers and sent to Kolyma. Tens of thousands of people passed before our eyes.

Me and my friends, who love literature, searched in the stream of new and new portions of convicts arriving from the west - writers, poets and, in general, writing people. We saw Pereverzev, Budantsev, talked with them. In the typhus hospital barracks, where I ended up in December 1938, they told me that Bruno Yasensky had died of typhus in one of the barracks departments.

And I found O. Mandelstam, as I already wrote, long before that - at the end of summer or at the beginning of autumn. The bugs survived us from the barracks, and we spent days and nights in the area in the ditches (gutters). Making my way along one ditch, I saw a man in a leather coat, with a "tuft" on his forehead. The usual "interrogation" took place:

- Where?

- From Moscow…

- What's your last name?

- Mandelstam...

- Excuse me, the same Mandelstam? Poet? Mandelstam smiled:

- That one...

I dragged him to my friends ... And he - in the gutter - read to us (from memory, of course) his poems, written in recent years and, apparently, never published. I remember - about one poem that we especially liked, he said:

He came to us every day and read and read. And we asked him: more, more.

And this frail, weak, hungry man, like all of us, was transformed: he could read poetry for hours. (Of course, we could not write anything down - there was no paper, and it would be impossible to save from searches).

And then comes the second part - very painful and bitter. We began (very quickly) to notice strange things behind him: he confidentially told us that he was afraid of death - the camp administration wanted to poison him. In vain we dissuaded him - before our eyes he went crazy.

He had already stopped reading poetry and was whispering "in our ears" under great secrecy about more and more intrigues of the camp administration. Everything was going to a sad denouement... The leather coat had disappeared somewhere... Mandelstam found himself in rags... He quickly got lice... He could no longer sit still - he itched all the time.

One morning I went to look for him in the zone - we decided to take him (at least by force) to the first-aid post - he was afraid to go there, because there - according to him - he was threatened with death from poison. Went around the whole area - and could not find him. As a result of questioning, it was possible to establish that a man who looked like him, who was in a delirium, was picked up in a ditch by orderlies and taken to another zone to the hospital.

We heard nothing more about him and decided that he was dead.

The whole story dragged on for several days.

Maybe he got stronger, recovered, and was sent to Kolyma? Unlikely. First, he was in a very serious condition; secondly, navigation ended in 1938 very early - I think in late September or early October - due to an unexpected outbreak of typhus.

The surname and initials of the “Bryansk agronomist” V. Merkulov are involuntarily alarming ...

Among our group of lovers of literature was Vasily Lavrentievich Merkulov, a Leningrad physiologist. But he was not in Kolyma - he, along with me and others who survived after the epidemic, was sent to Mariinsk, where we stayed until liberation - September 1946.

Our Merkulov could not know anything about the Kolyma period of Mandelstam's life, if he really got there. Which Merkulov told you this? namesake? Or ours, who decided to embellish events and give Mandelstam's death a romantic halo?

That's all, dear Ilya Grigorievich, that I considered myself obliged to tell you.

With deep respect - D. Zlotinsky.

In a postscript, the author of the letter asks I. Ehrenburg to keep his name a secret: “There is no cult, and a different wind is blowing, but for some reason I don’t want to “get out” in print with these facts. I can only assure you that everything I have written is the truth, and nothing but the truth.” The letter was then handed over by I. Ehrenburg to N. Ya. Mandelstam. It has been preserved by the compiler of these notes.

In March 1989, a "personal file on the prisoner ... O. E. Mandelstam" came to Moscow from Magadan. The document certified that the great poet died on December 27, 1938 at 12.30 in the hospital of the transit camp near Vladivostok. Death followed "from paralysis of the heart." He was taken to the hospital the day before.

There is also an extract from the minutes of the Special Meeting dated August 2, 1938: “Heard: case No. 19390 / C about Mandelstam (e) Osip Emilievich, born in 1891, son of a merchant, Socialist-Revolutionary. Resolved: Mandelstam (a) Osip Emilievich for k-r. to conclude the activity in a correctional labor camp for a period of five years, counting the period from 30 / 1U-38. To hand over the case to the archive.

The poem is addressed to N. Ya. Mandelstam.

Addressed to N. Ya. Mandelstam.

1899, October 30. — I was born in Saratov. Father - Yakov Arkadyevich Khazin (d. 1930), attorney at law. Mother - Vera Yakovlevna Khazina (d. 1943), doctor. Brothers - Alexander (1891-1920?), Eugene (1893-1974). Elder sister- Anna (d. 1938).

1899-1919. - Moving family to Kyiv. Trips with parents to Germany, France, Switzerland. Graduated from the Kyiv Women's Gymnasium. Passing external exams for a male gymnasium. Education in the art workshop of decorative art A.A. Exter. Participation in the design theatrical performances, streets of Kyiv in the days of festive processions. A visit to the night club of artists, writers, artists "Trash". Acquaintance with the Ehrenburgs. Friendship with Ehrenburg's wife Lyubov Mikhailovna Kozintseva.

1921, March. - Arrival of O.E. Mandelstam in Kyiv. Marriage. Departure to Moscow.
Mandelstam's trip to the Caucasus. Travel in Georgia.

1922. - Return to Moscow. Meeting with M.I. Tsvetaeva. Submission to the publishing house of the "Second Book of Poems" by O. Mandelstam.

1924. - Message from the editor of the magazine "Prozhektor" N.I. Bukharin on the ban on the publication of poetry
O. Mandelstam and about allowing the poet to translate. Moving to Leningrad.

1925-1927. — Life in Tsarskoye Selo. Acquaintance and friendship with A.A. Akhmatova. Translating business.

1927-1928. — The trip of N.Ya. Mandelstam to Yalta. Stay in a boarding house.

1929, autumn. - Moving to Moscow.

1930-1933. - Getting a job in the editorial office of the magazine "For Communist Education". Evening of poems by O. Mandelstam in the editorial office of the Literary Gazette. Preparation of the collected works of Mandelstam in 2 volumes. Meeting with the publisher's editor Fiction»
M.O. Chechanovsky, who demanded to remove the essay "Journey to Armenia" from the collected works. The appearance in Pravda of a critical article directed against the essay "Journey to Armenia".

1934, night of May 16-17. - Arrest O.E. Mandelstam. Search in the apartment. Viewing and selection of the poet's manuscripts. Seizure of manuscripts of poems, letters, notebooks. Repeat search. Visiting Bukharin with the news of Mandelstam's arrest. Meeting at the Political Red Cross with an assistant E.P. Peshkova - M.L. Winover.

1934, end of May. - Call N.Ya. Mandelstam to the Lubyanka. Meeting with the investigator. Date with
O. Mandelstam. Announcement of the verdict: deportation to the city of Cherdyn for a settlement for a period of 3 years for writing poems about Stalin. N.Ya. Mandelstam to accompany her husband into exile.

1934, June. - Preparing to leave. Collecting things and money from friends. Organized by the OGPU to send Mandelstams to Cherdyn. The path to the place of exile under escort of 3 armed soldiers. Establishing control over N.Ya. Mandelstam: the prohibition of free movement, eating. Arrival in Cherdyn. Surrender of the Mandelstams and their documents to the commandant. Placement in a separate hospital ward stressful condition O.E. Mandelstam after prison). Life of Cherdyn exiles and settlers. News from Moscow about the review of the case. Order to change the place of exile to Voronezh. Departure from Cherdyn.

1934-1937. — Life in Voronezh. Search for work and housing. Disease N.Ya. Mandelstam with typhus. Recovery. The work of O. Mandelstam in the local theater as the head of the literary part. Device N.Ya. Mandelstam in the editorial office of local radio broadcasting. Translation activity of N.Ya. Mandelstam. A trip to Moscow during O. Mandelstam's stay in a sanatorium in Tambov. Negotiations with leaders of the Union of Writers. Return to Voronezh. Joint work on the restoration of the poetic heritage of O. Mandelstam, confiscated during the arrest. Conversations about staying in prison, conditions of detention and investigation. Visits to Voronezh by V.N. Yakhontov, L. Ginzburg, M.V. Yudina. A trip to the dacha in Zadonsk with the financial support of Akhmatova and Pasternak.
The news of the death of S.M. Kirov. Changing the attitude of others towards the Mandelstams. Deprivation of work on the radio, in the theater, in the editorial offices of newspapers.

1937, May 16 - Obtaining a certificate of release from the commandant's office of the NKVD.
Return to Moscow. Meetings with friends. Refusal to register in Moscow and other cities.

1937, July - 1938, March. — Departure to Savelovo near Kimry. Financial support and help from friends. Wanderings in search of a place of residence (Maloyaroslavets, Kalinin, etc.).

1938. - Direction for 2 months from the Literary Fund to the Samatikha rest house near Murom (March 2). Meeting with A.A. Fadeev. Denial of employment.
O.E.'s arrest Mandelstam (night from 2 to 3 May). Search. Direction to Lubyanka.
A trip to his brother in Moscow with a message about the arrest and in Kalinin for a basket of papers (May 6). The news of the transfer of O. Mandelstam to the Butyrka prison. Message about sending Mandelstam to the camp for 5 years by decision of the OSO. Receipt of a letter from Mandelstam from Svitlag (Vladivostok). Meeting in Maloyaroslavets with his girlfriend G.N. Mekk, who returned from the camp. Trip to Kalinin. The story of the owner of the apartment about the search in the house and the warrant for the arrest of N.Ya. Mandelstam. Job and residence search. Arrangement in the spinning department at the Oktyabr factory in Strunino (near Zagorsk). Arrival at the factory on the night shift of two employees of the NKVD. Interrogation. Taking a subscription to appear the next day in the personnel department. Help and support for factory workers. Departure from Strunino.

1938, autumn - 1941. - Return to Kalinin. Working as a home worker in a toy making artel. Receiving news of the death of O. Mandelstam in the camp (1939). Trip to Moscow. Meeting with an employee of the apparatus of the Central Committee A.S. Shcherbakov. Transition as a teacher of foreign languages ​​to school. Evacuation in connection with the offensive of the Nazi troops. Export of papers from the archive of O. Mandelstam.

1941-1948. - Stay in a hospital on the island of Muynaks in the Aral Sea, then in a village near Dzhambul. Obtaining a pass to enter Tashkent, thanks to the efforts of A.A. Akhmatova and brother. Life in Tashkent. Teaching foreign languages ​​at the Central Asian University. Passing an external program for the philological faculty of the university, candidate exams. Work on a dissertation.

1948-1953. — Teaching English at the Pedagogical Institute in Ulyanovsk. Conducting a special course "History of the English language". An emergency meeting of the Department of Foreign Languages ​​chaired by the director of the institute and the secretary of the party organization in the case of N.Ya. Mandelstam. Demanding her immediate dismissal.

1953. - Arrival in Moscow. Refusal to accept a dissertation for defense at the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Job search.

1953-1955. — Direction as an English teacher to the Chita Pedagogical Institute. Departure from Chita at the invitation of the Cheboksary Pedagogical Institute.

1955, summer. - Receiving a refusal from Cheboksary for a position. Reception at the First Secretary of the Union of Writers A.A. Surkov. Discussion of questions about the publication of the poetic heritage of Mandelstam. Surkov's negotiations with the Minister of Education about getting a job. Determination by order of the Minister to the Cheboksary Pedagogical Institute. Visit of the director of Goslitizdat A.K. Kotov. Creation of the O.E. Mandelstam. Chairman K.M. Simonov. Work at the Pskov Pedagogical Institute. Refusal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for registration and housing in Moscow.

1956. - Obtaining a certificate of rehabilitation in the case of Mandelstam in 1938. Inclusion of a book of poems by O.E. Mandelstam. Help F.A. Vigdorova in obtaining a permanent residence permit in Moscow. Acquisition of a cooperative apartment with the support of K.M. Simonov.

1957. - Life in Moscow. PhD thesis defense at the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute. A.I. Herzen.

1959. - Work on the preparation for the publication of the literary heritage of her husband.

1960s — Start working on memoirs.

1965. - The first evening in memory of O. Mandelstam at Moscow State University under the chairmanship of I.G. Ehrenburg.

1970. - Release of the 1st volume of "Memoirs" in New York.

1971. - The publication of the "Second Book" in Paris.

1973. - Publication of "Poems" by O. Mandelstam in a small edition in the "Poet's Library" series.

1974. - Second edition in the same series.

1980, December 29. - Died N.Ya. Mandelstam. She was buried at the old Kuntsevsky (former Troekurovsky) cemetery in Moscow.

Additional intelligence

Dissertation published: Mandelstam N. Ya. Functions of the accusative case based on the materials of the Anglo-Saxon poetic monuments: author. dis. …cand. philol. Sciences / Leningrad. state ped. in-t im. A. I. Herzen; cafe English philol. - L., 1956. - 13 p.

* information beyond the scope of memories is in italics

Thanks

We thank Alexandra Yakovlevna Istogina for the photographs provided to the Museum.