the night of the twenty-first of June, Mikhail Mindich followed the Count’s advice to the letter. He went straight to his hotel, bathed, ate, and tucked himself in for a good night’s sleep. And when he awoke, he looked upon the events of the previous day with more perspective.
In the light of morning, he saw that the Count was perfectly right—that it was only a matter of fifty words. And it was not as if Shalamov had asked him to cut the last lines of The Cherry Orchard or The Seagull. It was a passage that might have appeared in the correspondence of any traveler in Europe and that Chekhov himself had, in all probability, composed without a second thought.
But after dressing and eating a late breakfast, when Mishka headed to the Central House of Writers, he happened to pass that statue of Gorky on Arbatskaya Square, where the brooding statue of Gogol once had stood. Other than Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky had been Mishka’s greatest contemporary hero.
“Here was a man,” said Mishka to himself (as he stood in the middle of the sidewalk ignoring the passersby), “who once wrote with such fresh and unsentimental directness that his memories of youth became our memories of youth.”
But having settled in Italy, he was lured back to Russia by Stalin in ’34 and set up in Ryabushinsky’s mansion—so that he could preside over the establishment of Socialist Realism as the sole artistic style of the entire Russian people. . . .
“And what has been the fallout of that?” Mishka demanded of the statue.
All but ruined, Bulgakov hadn’t written a word in years. Akhmatova had put down her pen. Mandelstam, having already served his sentence, had apparently been arrested again. And Mayakovsky? Oh, Mayakovsky . . .
Mishka pulled at the hairs of his beard.
Back in ’22, how boldly he had predicted to Sasha that these four would come together to forge a new poetry for Russia. Improbably, perhaps. But in the end, that is exactly what they had done. They had created the poetry of silence.
“Yes, silence can be an opinion,” said Mishka. “Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry—one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn’t be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest.”
With that, Mishka turned his back on Maxim Gorky and the Central House of Writers, and he went instead to the offices of Goslitizdat. There, he mounted the stairs, brushed past the receptionist, and opened door after door until he found the ferret in a conference room, presiding over an editorial meeting. In the center of the table were platters of cheese and figs and cured herring, the very sight of which, for some unaccountable reason, filled Mishka with fury. Turning from Shalamov in order to see who had barged through the door were the junior editors and assistant editors, all young and earnest—a fact that only infuriated Mishka more.
“Very good!” he shouted. “I see you have your knives out. What will you be cutting in half today? The Brothers Karamozov?”
“Mikhail Fyodorovich,” said Shalamov in shock.
“What is this!” Mishka proclaimed, pointing to a young woman who happened to have a slice of bread topped with herring in her hand. “Is that bread from Berlin? Be careful, comrade. If you take a single bite, Shalamov will shoot you from a cannon.”
Mishka could see that the young girl thought he was mad; but she put the piece of bread back on the table nonetheless.
“Aha!” Mishka exclaimed in vindication.
Shalamov rose from his chair, both unnerved and concerned.
“Mikhail,” he said. “You are clearly upset. I would be happy to speak with you later in my office about whatever is on your mind. But as you can see, we are in the midst of a meeting. And we still have hours of business to attend to. . . .”
“Hours of business. Of that I have no doubt.”
Mishka began ticking off the rest of the day’s business, and with each item he picked up a manuscript from in front of one of the staff members and flung it across the room in Shalamov’s direction.
“There are statues to be moved! Lines to be elided! And at five o’clock, you mustn’t be late for your bath with comrade Stalin. For if you are, who will be there to scrub his back?”