IGOR POMERANZEV
57
the 20th Party Congress. They laughed so hard that they woke me
up, and upon awakening I could not grasp why on earth they could
be laughing so much . Now I think that it was not only the prose that
they liked, but the fact that they were taking pleasure in something
forbidden, something that most of their friends and colleagues not
only could not touch, but would not have dared to touch.
Today , along with the writers tortured and murdered in camps
and prisons, the authorities rehabilitate their books . Obviously , not
all of the writers who were killed are rehabilitated . To add to this,
the ones who are rehabilitated are looked at shamefacedly . And their
books, too , are published with embarrassment - in condensed
forms , with cuts, and in limited editions . For decades, Russian read–
ers waited for the poems, prose, and essays of Osip Mendelstam to
come out. Bit by bit, they collected Mendelstam's legacy, risking
accusation under the clause "possession and dissemination." I first
became acquainted with Mendelstam's lyrical verse not by reading
it, but by hearing it recited.
It
was passed on from person to person
like watchwords. His poetry signified a quality of spiritual
resistance. I think that if the regime were to transform all of Russian
poetry into ashes, there would emerge several hundred people who
would be able to recreate it from memory. I think that nowhere in
the world do people memorize poetry as in Russia.
Books were and remain for me not narratives about life, but
means of intensively and vigorously living life. I am moved not only
by the content of books, but even by their concrete rectangular
abjectness . I would gasp from shortness of breath and feel my heart
race only from feeling the covers of old books, soaked through with
the smell of dust and dampness, which I found in my father's closet.
I would spend hours at a stretch in the children's library, not reading
but merely sorting through books, touching their sacred bindings .
Having picked two - we were allowed only two at a time - I would
run home as if driven by some sort of physiological necessity . Often
my mother tore away by force a volume of Dumas or Jules Verne,
and pushed me out into the street so that I would get some fresh air.
Even then I outsmarted her. I usually managed to hide my paper joy
under my shirt.
It
is strange that my father, as much as I remember
him , read the same books that I did . He was about forty-five, and
read along with me all the adventure stories . Maybe, while reading
them, he could escape from the ugly, stillborn official articles which
he had either to edit or write himself. Later, together with me, he
