Russian Requiem

The Death of a Poet

The Last Days of Marina Tsvetaeva

by Irma Kudrova

Overlook, 232 pp., $29.95

TWO MAJOR, RECENT WORKS, done into English and issued by the same American publisher, deal with the lives of Russia’s four greatest poets of the 20th century: Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak.

The fall of Soviet communism allowed the opening of minds as well as archives, and the publication of important memoirs of the general torment inflicted by that regime on Russian intellectual life, as well as the printing of significant records of specific secret police atrocities and other official documents. Both of these books examine the devastating consequences of unique events in Soviet history on the lives of the poets.

The horror inflicted on a writer of genius like Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag, speaks for itself. As to the works of Emma Gerstein and Irma Kudrova, it is probable they will only be read in their American editions by specialists. Their idiom is quaintly overwrought, with a studied theatricality that seems false compared with the real anguish of the Russian nation, and that places them far from the traditional standards of literary research. Nevertheless, they have much to tell Western scholars and others interested in the destiny of the Soviet intelligentsia during and after the Stalinist purges. These books are also somewhat scandalous from the viewpoint of those who have come to see the outstanding 20th century Russian poets as martyrs of a cruel dictatorship. The memoirist Gerstein and the scholar Kudrova both see themselves more as literary detectives than as serious critics, and their common aim seems to be to mitigate the inhuman nature of Stalinism. Each practices a sort of Soviet-nostalgic revisionism, which would not be out of place on an Anglo-American campus, where sneering at (when not ignoring) Stalin’s victims is the established form. But from the pens of Russian scholars, this seems dissonant and disturbing.

The key event in the Moscow Memoirs of Gerstein, who died at 99 in 2002, is Mandelstam’s composition of a verse attack on Stalin. The poem dates from 1934, and the direct aftermath of the forced collectivization of the Soviet peasantry. The text is typically known as “the Stalin epigram,” with opening lines translated here:

The poem goes on to describe Stalin without naming him, but mentioning his “fat fingers” and “cockroach eyes,” and evoking his retinue of sycophants as “rabble.” Finally, the dictator is said to savor each execution committed on his orders. (An alternate version refers to Stalin as “the hunter and slayer of peasants.”)

The circumstances in which Mandelstam wrote these lines have been described at length in Hope Against Hope, the classic memoir by his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam. Published in the West in 1970, when she was 71, Hope Against Hope seemed to forever record the truth about the poet’s calvary. Immediately after the poem’s composition, when it became known in Mandelstam’s circle, he was arrested by the secret police and banished from Moscow. In 1937, he was arrested again–and dispatched to the Gulag, where he died.

Gerstein adds very little of substance to these facts, but she is inhabited by a spirit of resentment over details she says were misrecorded by Mandelstam’s widow, and petty slights she claims to have suffered from the poet himself. Contrary to the canonical account, in which the poet seems a somewhat otherworldly figure, she describes a Mandelstam so driven with hatred of the regime that he not only made no attempt to conceal the poem but recited it to numerous individuals and asked others (Gerstein included) to memorize it. She expresses dismay to have learned that she was not, as Mandelstam seemed to imply, the only person recruited for the risky task of recording the verses without writing them down.

In addition, Gerstein expresses rage–obviously stored up over many years, since this volume first appeared when she was 95 years old–that the poet may have, even inadvertently, revealed her name to his interrogators. Later, she confronted him, and he admitted having done so, arguing that he could not name Pasternak or Akhmatova, who were also in on the “secret.” Gerstein writes, “It’s quite sad to learn that you have been selected in advance as a sacrifice to save others.” But she was not arrested, and the only punishment she received for her involvement with Mandelstam’s “anti-Soviet” behavior was dismissal from work and a bad employment reference. In this way she resembles the American Communists who overdramatize their suffering in the 1950s; like them, she lost a job, while Mandelstam and others lost their lives.

Gerstein also gives way to irritability when discussing Mandelstam’s motives for denouncing Stalin in verse. He was, she says, henpecked into demanding freedom as an author. Writes Gerstein: “It was madness . . . to hover persistently before the eyes of blood-crazed officials or mortally frightened writers and editors. . . . Yet [Nadezhda Mandelstam] could not withstand Mandelstam’s elemental craving to live and work freely and openly, and [her] gambling instinct constantly incited Osip to keep trying.”

It appears uniquely Soviet to describe monumental acts of civic heroism and steadfast intellectual independence in such a contemptuous (and contemptible) manner. Mandelstam seems to have well and truly gone insane under the pressure of official harassment. But Gerstein, whose relations with the Mandelstams were something other than normal, also seems possessed of an unhealthy obsession with placing herself at the center of modern Russian literary history, even if she must tear down the moral examples of Mandelstam and his widow.

She does the same to Akhmatova, with whose son, Lev Gumilyov, Gerstein was closely linked. Akhmatova had lived through the execution of Lev’s father, the gifted poet Nikolai Gumilyov, at the hands of the secret police in the early years of Bolshevik rule. Akhmatova then suffered the arrest and exile of her son, along with that of Mandelstam, who had also been her intimate. Her verse cycle about her son’s imprisonment, Requiem, is one of the landmarks of Russian literature. Lev Gumilyov survived to become one of contemporary Russia’s worst Jew-baiting crackpots, but Gerstein devotes little attention to that detail. She is much more interested in chewing over the fate of certain manuscripts, and elaborating on alleged discrepancies between her memory and the powers of recollection of Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam, once again in the interest of boosting her own slender intellectual stature.

Nevertheless, Gerstein’s curious writings include many interesting observations, along with, in the present edition, incomprehensible failures of translation. For example, it is suggested that the poet Gumilyov’s manuscripts had been destroyed by some children who used them to make “crackers,” and we later read that Osip Mandelstam wrote a note on some “fried eggs” that belonged to Gerstein. We also learn that Mandelstam had a distinctive, almost surrealist, method of writing verse: He would form a phrase or line and speak it to a companion, who would repeat it back to him. If he liked it, he would keep the line. This habit seems to explain, in some manner, the ineffable clarity, music, and originality of Mandelstam’s verse, which is difficult to render in English, but which makes him, in the eyes of many, the greatest Russian poet after Pushkin.

Mandelstam’s creation of “the Stalin epigram” became a defining event in Soviet history, as well as the cause of the author’s destruction. Another such incident is much less well known today, but serves as a similar emblematic moment, again involving protest against Stalin, and also bringing with it the destruction of a poet. But in this case, described in Irma Kudrova’s book, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva was connected to the protest in a much more sinister way.

Unlike Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Pasternak, who stayed in Russia, Tsvetaeva had gone into exile in Czechoslovakia, later moving to France. The act with which the ultimate tragedy of Tsvetaeva began is scantily described in Kudrova’s text, but is known to historians of Soviet espionage and the anti-Stalinist left in the West. That was the assassination in Switzerland–on September 4, 1937, at the height of the Moscow purges–of a middle-aged man bearing a passport identifying him as a Czech citizen named Hans Eberhard.

Eberhard’s real name was Ignacy Porecki. He was also known as Ignace Reiss, and was a senior official of Stalin’s secret police. A veteran of the Communist International, as well as Red Army Intelligence (GRU), he played a crucial role in Soviet espionage. Ten weeks before his death, Reiss had taken a stand against the purges that had just decapitated the officer corps of the armed forces–the purges that Stalin had ordered extended to Republican Spain, in the middle of its civil war. Reiss broke with Stalin in a thundering letter, returned his decorations, proclaimed his solidarity with the exiled Leon Trotsky, and warned against the spread of the KGB’s murderous actions into the West–specifically, to the Spanish Republic. His liquidation came almost immediately and caused immense publicity in the West. It was among the developments that precipitated the defection of Whittaker Chambers from the Soviet espionage network.

The Reiss murder, a central event in the history of Soviet intelligence operations, led to more deaths, and involved people also assigned to the murder of Trotsky. A complicated trail led the Swiss police to France. With the cooperation of the French police, the commanding node of a Soviet secret terrorist group was located in Paris, in the person of Sergei Efron, the husband of Marina Tsvetaeva. Efron escaped the police and returned to the Soviet fatherland, but the uproar alienated many Russian exiles from Tsvetaeva, including Vladimir Nabokov, who agreed with the widespread belief among émigrés that she was a Soviet agent.

Worse, Efron’s group was also connected to a conspiracy to murder Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, who lived in France, and to the sensational disappearance of a White Russian general, Yevgeny Karlovich Miller. The Reiss, Sedov, and Miller cases have become subjects for academic commentators on Tsvetaeva’s work, and the controversy centers on how much she knew about Efron’s activities. But, as this book shows, the weight of common sense supports a belief that, since Efron had recruited her entire circle to the KGB, the poet could not have been ignorant of her husband’s evil work.

Efron had fled to the Soviet Union. Her daughter Ariadna having preceded him, Tsvetaeva, with her son Grigory, nicknamed Mur, also returned to her native land. For some time she and Efron enjoyed the patronage of the KGB, living in a secret police rest home and enjoying (in the poet’s own words) “tortes and pineapple.” But Efron’s performance in the Reiss case had not been brilliant, and he and others who had returned home with him were purged and executed. Marina committed suicide in 1941.

Irma Kudrova has made it her mission to advocate for a revisionist view of this series of events, in which she believes Tsvetaeva, presumably because of her undoubted gifts, must be treated as a saintly innocent. Sympathy is begged from the reader in pondering the psychic pain of the poet on learning that her husband was a spy involved in assassinations. Kudrova seems to accept the argument of Ariadna Efron–the surviving daughter of Tsvetaeva’s marriage to the organizer and commander of a team of professional torturers and murderers–that all of their victims were enemies of the Soviet state who deserved to be killed.

Thus, Kudrova writes plaintively: “After more than a half century, Sergei Efron’s reputation ought to be reconsidered.” But why should KGB intellectuals and assassins be granted some special dispensation by history? Why, when so many of their victims are now forgotten–victims such as Reiss, who, like Mandelstam, defied and challenged Stalin, but who also was an unknown professional revolutionary, not an author? Kudrova comments blithely that Efron and his associates “took part in a whole series of anti-Trotskyite operations, the details of which we may learn some day.” But, in reality, we already know the names of many targets of these “wet affairs,” as murders and other criminal acts were known in the parlance of the secret police.

They include the Catalan author and political leader Andreu Nin, who led the movement in which George Orwell fought in the Spanish civil war. Nin, who translated novels into Catalan editions that are still read today, is well-remembered in Spain. But he was tormented and then slain by Soviet agents. The names of others similarly disposed of are ciphers in the lost pages of history: Rudolf Klement, Erwin Wolf, Hans Freund, Kurt Landau, and Marc Rhein were young anti-Stalinists cut down in their youth or early middle age, kidnapped and murdered by KGB killers in Western Europe. Do they not deserve some consideration by history, no less than a Stalinist assassin who happened to have the good fortune to be married to a famous author?

Yet, in Kudrova’s bizarre view, it is painful to imagine Efron and other gangsters being accused by their Soviet masters, before their own deaths in the purges, of Trotskyism–since they had done so much to destroy that spectral presence in the minds of the Soviet nomenklatura. Kudrova cannot empathize with the targets of their activities, some of whom also had children. Andreu Nin left two daughters; Ignace Reiss had a son. Lev Sedov had a nephew who survives today in Mexico, and he, in turn, has a daughter, Dr. Nora Volkow, the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky, who is director of the National Institute on Drug Addiction in Rockville, Maryland, and who was recently described in a news story as “one of the highest-ranking Hispanic women in the Bush administration.” Born and raised in the West, she was spared the degradation visited on other descendants of prominent Russian intellectuals.

It has often been argued that belief in Soviet socialism would survive in Western academia long after the collapse of the system in the East. But we have also seen that post-Communist Russia has borrowed many of the worst aspects of Western culture, from mafia economics to neo-Nazism. It was predictable that writers like Gerstein and Kudrova would adopt the Western academic habit of moral relativism, seeing the resistance to evil by Osip Mandelstam and others as “insane,” and the accommodation to that same evil by the denizens of the Tsvetaeva circle as trivial faults. Too bad for the historical and cultural legacy of the Russian people.

Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.