E X I L E
51
exercise began with the words
aM
adam, ya doktor, vot banan"
(Madam, I am the doctor, here is a banana). Best of all, I used to
compose for a daily
emigre
paper, the Berlin
Rul,
the first Russian
crossword puzzles, which I baptized
a
krestoslo vitsy."
I find it
strange to recall that freak existence. Deeply beloved of blurbists is
the list of more or less earthy professions that a young author (writing
about Life and Truth-which are so much more important, of course,
than mere "art") has followed: newspaper boy, soda jerk, monk,
wrestler, foreman in a steel mill, bus driver, and so on. Alas, none of
these callings has been mine.
My passion for good writing put me in close contact with various
Russian authors abroad. I was young in those days and much more
keenly interested
in
literature than I am now. Current prose and
poetry, brilliant planets and pale galaxies, flowed by the casement
of my garret night after night. There were independent authors of
diverse age and talent, and there were groupings and cliques within
which a number of young or youngish writers, some of them very
gifted, clustered around a philosophizing critic. The most important
of these mystagogues were the so-called Adamites, an appellation
fancifully derived (by the poet Hodasevich, I think) from the name
of their leader, a talented critic who strove to combine the greenish
twilight of a kind of catacumbal Christianity with the pagan mores
of ancient Rome.
The Adamitcs believed that neither a mere negation of Bolshev–
ism, nor the routine ideals of Western democracies were sufficient to
build a philosophy upon which
emigre
literature could lean. They
thirsted for a creed as a jailed drug addict thirsts for his pet heaven.
Rather pathetically, they envied Parisian Catholic groups for the
seasoned subtleties that Russian mysticism so obviously lacked. Dos–
toevskian emotion could not compete with neo-Thomist thought; but
were there not other ways? The longing for a system of faith, a
constant teetering on the brink of some accepted religious formula,
was found to provide a special satisfaction of its own. Only much
later, in the forties, did most of the Adamites finally discover a
definite slope down which to slide. This slope was the enthusiastic
nationalism that could call a state (Stalin's Russia, in this case)
good and lovable for no other reason than because its army had
won a war. In the early thirties, however, the nationalistic precipice
was only faintly perceived and the Adamites were still enjoying the
